Jim Buck, Loyalist College’s athletics director, says he doesn’t necessarily see marijuana as a performance-enhancing drug, but feels college athletes should not use it. Photo by Tyson Nayler, QNet News
By Tyson Nayler [1]
BELLEVILLE – Despite marijuana becoming legal this week, student athletes belonging to the Ontario Colleges Athletics Association [2] are still prohibited from using it.
Loyalist College Athletics director Jim Buck [3] says college athletes are banned from using cannabis because it is prohibited by Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport [4].
Since 1991, the college athletics association has been a part of the Canadian Anti-Doping Program [5] run by the CCES. That means every athlete who is part of a team that competes at a national level is required not to use any of the substances on a list set by a committee of scientific experts working for the World Anti-Doping Agency [6]. This includes all of Loyalist College’s teams except for the Lancers men’s and women’s rugby teams, which only compete on a provincial level.
Buck said he doesn’t believe in the use of cannabis, whether it’s legal or illegal.
“Now that it’s legal we can compare it with alcohol,” he told QNet News. “We can’t prevent someone on the team having a couple of beers and drinking on their own time. We do, however, have team rules that we try to impose, like 24- or 48-hour (drinking ban) prior to competition … When we go on the road, for example, it’s against our varsity policy for athletes to drink alcohol on the road or bring alcohol with them in hotel rooms. Marijuana would be the exact same thing.”
Other substances that show up on the prohibited list are caffeine and codeine. Even though these aren’t illegal, and people can consume them daily, they are still viewed as giving athletes a competitive edge.
Buck said that even though marijuana is a banned substance, he doesn’t necessarily see it as a performance-enhancing drug.
“I have mixed feelings on it. I think in some ways it can give athletes a competitive edge, but I don’t think that people are going to somehow rise to the podium because they ingested marijuana.”
The World Anti-Doping Agency has a committee that revises the list of banned substances annually, Paul Melia, the head of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, told QNet News. The committee uses three criteria to decide whether a substance should be banned for athletes: whether it’s performance-enhancing, whether it’s harmful to the athlete, and whether it’s contrary to the spirit of sport.
“In the case of marijuana, WADA still believes that it falls under the first two criteria,” Melia said. “Their experts say that they have enough scientific evidence to support this.”
CCES conducts both in-competition and out-of-competition tests on college athletes. Because cannabis is something that can be used recreationally, it is only tested for in competition. An athlete could receive as much as a two-year suspension for testing positive, Melia said. But if the athlete can prove that they only used the substance outside of competition and it wasn’t intended to be used as a performance-enhancer, the sanction would be reduced to a warning, he said.
For the first few years that the CCES did drug testing, the reporting threshold that laboratories used when testing for cannabis was only 15 nanograms per millilitre. (A nanogram is a billionth of a gram.) Because of this, Melia said, many college and university student athletes were testing positive for marijuana that they were only using recreationally. To avoid that problem, the reporting threshold was raised to 150 nanograms per millilitre.
“The intention of our anti-doping program is not to try and police any recreational drug use, but instead focus on athletes who are using them for performance-enhancing reasons and cheat,” said Melia.
When QNet spoke to half a dozen student athletes at Loyalist this week, as marijuana became legal in Canada, most said they take issue with it still being banned for them.
Sibongile Nyirenda, a second-year architecture student on the women’s basketball team, says she understands the reasoning of the CCES but “I feel that every athlete should be allowed to use marijuana for recreational purposes now that it’s legal.
“As long as we don’t smoke it before a game or an important event, I think we should be able to use it when we like.”