By Jeff G. Konin
We caught you with marijuana in your system. A phrase repeated over and over for the past few decades during the era of drug testing in sports. The next step was to send an athlete off for counseling and determine if a suspension or penalty would be warranted.
I have previously written in this column and in all likelihood every reader is aware of the societal shifts toward greater acceptance and understanding of cannabis products ranging from THC Delta-9 to CBD. While drug testing will likely continue if not to detect marijuana but perhaps for other performance enhancing or street drugs, the view on cannabis is and must change. As I work closely with athletic programs, I see first-hand that there are essentially three approaches to this cultural shift. The first is to make things happen. That is, recognize the changes and better understand how to align program policy and philosophy with current trends. The second approach is to watch things happen. Here, programs recognize things are changing, but prefer to wait and see what others do that does or doesn’t work. And the third is to wonder what happened. This essentially describes the programs that really don’t understand the need for change and have dug their heels in to their current abstinence and punitive type approach.
For all too long, positive tests “catching” athletes with THC metabolites through an announced urinalysis was the trigger for a counseling referral. Why? Because that is what we all did, and because all forms of cannabis were banned in most sporting organizations. I believe strongly that to move toward a more contemporary approach to testing programs, we need to ask “why?” we test and consider transforming the communication approaches we implement for education and testing.
To begin with, instead of “catching” athletes with marijuana in their systems, wouldn’t it be better if we “identified” marijuana in their system? This change sounds much less authoritative and law enforcing and leads us closer toward a “why is it in one’s system” to better understand the rationale and impact of personal use. For decades our only educational message was that from the “say no to drugs” era and we said marijuana was bad. The abstinence only message has proven not to be effective as we are learning more about true adverse effects of cannabis and equally more so any potential benefits. In other words, the message that cannabis is all bad is no longer believable. This has led to where we are today in that athletes do not believe the education that we are disseminating as being genuine. Some partake in usage when it is knowingly on a banned list and instead will spend their time learning how to mask a drug test.
Instead, repacking educational deliverables in a more factual and meaningful approach would serve an administration well. For example, begin by separating the non-euphoric components of the plant from those that do not create a high. This is basic knowledge and these differences should no longer be grouped together in a term such as “marijuana”. Perhaps correlating facts about how cannabinoids such as CBD or THC work in one’s system. Again, not an overkill on a scientific lecture, but rather layperson materials to better educate stakeholders. What about how dosage and even application methods make a difference in the benefits versus risks of use. Is it a good approach now to have any athlete self-dosing with a total lack of formal knowledge? Do we allow athletes to trial and error with any other potentially therapeutically beneficial or harmful drug?
Rather than clump all things marijuana in one group should we not educate on how vaping, smoking, and dabbing are so very different than topicals, patches and even edibles? We do not expect our athletes to become experts on this nor do they have the time to focus all of their attention on marijuana knowledge. Heck, many of us who care for them aren’t even close to being experts. A little bit of knowledge can be helpful when it comes to cannabis use in athletes since usage currently in all likelihood exceeds realistic and factual information dissemination in athletic settings.
Are all uses of various cannabinoids good? Are all bad? Clearly an approach that takes a hardline stance in either direction is not an accurate and honest form of education. Like all other settings and population of people, it is long past due time that we address the “why” of drug testing for marijuana. Despite slowly learning more and more each day about the benefits of cannabinoids, there are circumstances that yield abuse of marijuana that can assist us in helping athletes cope with mental health-related issues and other ailments that they are attempting to manage on their own.
Jeff G. Konin is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Athletic Training in the Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing and Health Sciences at Florida International University (FIU) where he directs the Global Initiative for Cannabinoid Research and Education. To learn more about FIU’s cannabinoid research and education initiative you can visit their website at https://go.fiu.edu/GlobalCannabis. Views represented in this column do not reflect that of Florida International University and are solely attributed to Dr. Jeff G. Konin.
