The recent suspension of an American track sprinter for what she says was a one-time use of marijuana brings up some good questions about sports and drugs.
Writing on his blog TheWhyAxis@substack.com, former Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham points out that marijuana is the opposite of the performance-enhancing drugs that sports federations rightly try hard to detect. If that is the case, he asks, why is the punishment such that the woman who won the 100-meter dash in last month’s U.S. Olympic Trials has to miss the Tokyo Olympics?
Marijuana “quite famously impairs judgment, motor coordination and reaction time, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse,” Ingraham wrote. “The entire point of cannabis is that it makes you slow and goofy and giggly — not exactly the mindset elite athletes seek to cultivate during competition.”
The suspended athlete, former LSU runner Sha’Carri Richardson, said she used marijuana after learning that her biological mother had died. She said she was dealing with that along with the pressure brought on by her sudden ascension to the world stage that the Olympics provides. Ingraham added that Richardson smoked the marijuana legally in Oregon and tested positive for the drug after winning her Olympic Trials final.
Obviously, Richardson got suspended because she broke the rules. She used a banned drug and got caught. The stress about her mother’s death and her growing spotlight is understandable, but she made the bad decision to use a banned drug when a couple of glasses of wine would have had the same effect — and would have been completely within the rules.
In fact, the different ways that the drug policemen of sports — from the Olympics to American professional leagues — treat marijuana and alcohol may be the most interesting element of Richardson’s case.
Neither alcohol nor marijuana improves sports performance. But alcohol has decades of legal and social acceptance behind it, and the industry’s biggest companies spend millions of dollars a year in sports sponsorships and advertising.
Marijuana, by comparison, is literally just now “coming out of the closet” in much of the world after decades of being illegal. As Richardson discovered, recreational use of the drug may be legal in some states, but widespread social tolerance may be a generation away.
Ingraham wrote that marijuana is one of just four drugs on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s “substance of abuse” list. It uses that label to describe unapproved drugs that are used “outside the context of sport” — meaning not for cheating. The other three on the abuse list are cocaine, heroin and ecstasy.
Ingraham noted that alcohol is an allowed drug for athletic competition. So is caffeine, even though Ingraham says it “very clearly does enhance athletic performance.”
Consider this a lesson learned. Richardson did break the rules and deserves some sort of sanction. But because her infraction was not an attempt to improve performance, forcing her to miss the Olympics is an excessive penalty.
