Cannabis, the NCAA, and Division III Athletes
Last season, the NCAA revolutionized how it handles cannabis use among athletes. Did anyone notice?
TLDR:
NCAA completely changed cannabis1 policy in the 2022-23 season.
First time positive test for cannabis: no loss of eligibility.
Every subsequent positive test for cannabis: no loss of eligibility, as long as college/university attests that the athlete is participating in substance-use education and management plan (EMP).
NCAA prohibitions on performance enhancing substances, as well as narcotics, remain intact and are as stringent as ever.
College/university can have a more stringent substance use/abuse policy.
You are not protected by any of the clauses of your school’s substance use policy.
The NCAA really doesn’t care if you smoke pot.
They used to. But not anymore. Not really.
Want to know more about how the NCAA used to classify cannabis and their rules on sanctioning those who tested positive? Follow the footnote.2
And this is probably a good time to point out that the NCAA isn’t one thing. It is a federated organization with multiple divisions and describing the NCAA is so boring I am not going to make it to the end of the sentence. You get the idea, it is a big, complicated organization.
For our purposes there are three parties in the NCAA that matter.
Division III - Each division has its own governance committee, and publishes its own rules and regulations in a yearly manual (below).
NCAA Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports (CSMAS) - a committee composed of physicians and researchers who make recommendations on policy concerning the health of NCAA athletes.
Your college or university - the proverbial ‘member institution.’
CSMAS
The CSMAS - the doctors and scientists responsible for the health and well-being of NCAA student athletes - want cannabis removed from the list of banned substances. They aren’t saying you should smoke pot, but they are saying that the NCAA needs to maintain a ban on substances that are performance enhancing, or that are a significant threat to the health and well-being of student-athletes. And they don’t think cannabis qualifies in either category.
Want to know more about the CSMAS, what it means to test positive and the individual variability in testing? Follow the footnote.3
Division III
The board that governs Division III wasn’t ready to remove cannabis from the banned substances list,4 but they came around to a compromise position in 2022-23, and the policy remains unchanged this year.
You can look for yourself (D3 Manual, page 152), but basically the deal is this. The first time you fail an NCAA drug test for cannabis, there is no eligibility sanction. But your college or university has to come up with a substance-use education and management plan (EMP) for you. And you have to play ball. That means following your EMP. The NCAA is clear what that means:
you will get to know someone in campus counseling services;
you will answer a bunch of questions intended to determine if you have a serious drug problem; and
you will participate in ‘evidence-based educational sessions.’ How many sessions, and exactly what they entail, is not stipulated, and most member institutions won’t have the capacity to do much more than enroll the student-athlete in an online course.
Here’s the thing. As long as the student-athlete participates in the EMP, and the school attests that the student-athlete is making a good-faith effort, the student-athlete can keep testing positive for cannabis, hypothetically dozens of times, with no sanction. Section 18.4.1.5.3.2 is literally titled ‘Third Positive Test and Beyond’. Beyond.
If the school wants NCAA sanctions for a student-athlete after a second failed cannabis drug test, it can ensure this by refusing to vouch for the student-athlete's genuine participation in the EMP. In such cases, the NCAA will suspend the athlete for 25% of the season after the second failed test and 50% after the third. But if it gets to that, a lot has gone wrong in this particular student-athlete’s relationships (and not just their relationship with cannabis).
Want to know more about the discredited ‘Gateway Drug’ idea, and the evidence that the NCAA thinks that cannabis might be the OPPOSITE of a ‘Gateway Drug’? Follow the footnote.5
About those member institutions, and Section 10.2
A college or university can write their own policy, it can be far more stringent than the NCAA policy, and if you go to that school you need to follow that policy. But, theoretically at least, so does the school:
10.2 Knowledge of Use of Banned Drugs. A member institution's athletics department staff members or others employed by the intercollegiate athletics program who have knowledge of a student-athlete's use at any time of a substance on the list of banned drugs, as set forth in Bylaw 31.2.3.1, shall follow institutional procedures dealing with drug abuse or shall be subject to disciplinary or corrective action as set forth in Bylaw 19.5.2. (emphasis added)
Bylaw 19.5.2 is bad news. That’s the ‘penalties for major violations’ section. Nobody wants that.
Anyway, the point of that passage is that if a student-athlete tests positive or admits to drug use, this cannot be ignored. It's imperative to follow the athletic department’s official, written policies for handling drug use and abuse.6 This is what the NCAA means by 'institutional procedures'.
Interestingly, many of these policies have a 'Voluntary Disclosure' amnesty provision.7 That would mean that if a coach suspends the student athlete for drug use after the student athlete made a legitimate amnesty-triggering voluntary disclosure, it is the coach who has now violated 'institutional procedures.'
But so what? I can’t find a single case where the NCAA investigated a school for the violation of protections afforded to student-athletes through the drug-testing policy.8
What should you do?
Well, if you aren’t currently using cannabis, don’t start because of this stupid blog.
If you are a D3 swimmer, you might want to read the substance-use policy for your athletic department. But I also wouldn’t trust any part of the policy that seems to offer procedural protections for student-athletes.
If you are a recruit, it sucks, but the truth is there is no mechanism to make coaches and athletics departments play by their own rules, treat you fairly, or afford you even the most basic protections in this area. When you make a decision about where to go, it has to come down to trust, and track-record. It should give you pause to find out that a coach violated a safe-harbor provisions for substance use or anything else, or failed to strictly honor a student-athlete’s right to privacy when it comes to mental health, anxiety, emotional struggles, eating disorders, or substance use. A single visible instance of abuse is too often part of a larger, hidden pattern.
Want to know more about why student athletes should not trust the nominal privacy protections in member institution testing procedures, nor trust that their coach is bound by safe-harbor or voluntary disclosure provisions? Follow the footnote.9
If you really have a substance-abuse problem, go to the campus counseling services, a trusted family member, or health care professional. Worry about athletics later. Your well-being is the first priority.
If you are currently a casual cannabis user, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe your coach or program has looked the other way for years, but if they change course tomorrow, you have no protection. Programs and coaches can violate provisions of the athletic department’s policies and the NCAA is not going to step in.10 Even if you appeal a suspension and get it reduced, you still lost.11 Every meet of your highly-finite college swimming career is precious. To be stripped of even one chance to compete is to lose something of real value, something you will never get back.
Cannabis is referred to as ‘Cannabinoids’ in the NCAA Manual, which they define as ‘marijuana and THC’. Cannabis in this discussion covers smoked, vaped and various edible forms of the substance.
Through the 2021-22 season, the NCAA lumped cannabis with narcotics, into one sanction schedule. Basically, you failed a drug test, you lost half your season.
In 2022-23, the NCAA moved cannabis out of this category into the special category described above.
The rough sanctions for narcotics use remain in place.
Honestly, I find this reassuring. Pretty much all narcotics are dangerous (for instance fentanyl is in this class), and we are not talking about athletes who can produce a legit prescription for whichever narcotic caused the failed test.
It’s like the NCAA still cares about the health of student athletes. That’s why they have sanctions for use of narcotics. By logical implication, that would also be why the NCAA does not - on its own - impose sanctions for use of cannabis.
CSMAS is not passive. While they couldn't remove cannabis from the list of banned substances (only the division committees can do that), they did have the power to adjust the threshold for a positive test. In 2022, they raised the requisite THC level in urine for a positive result from 35 nanograms per milliliter to 150 nanograms per milliliter.
Is 150 nanograms per milliliter a lot? Uh, yeah. Depending on a range of factors - how often you ingest cannabis, the strength of the cannabis, and a range of physiological factors that affect how much THC you eliminate through urine - you could be really, really high when you gave the urine sample and still come in under 150 ng/ml.
I cannot emphasize enough how individualized this stuff is. This study measured the THC content of urine up to four hours after participants smoked cannabis standardized to contain 27 mg of THC. If you are not familiar with normal dosing increments for THC, believe me when I say that is just…way…way…too much THC. Anyway, four hours later, the average THC content of the urine samples was 179.4 ng/ml, give or take 146.9 ng/Ml.
Not a typo. The range of variation in urine THC concentrations was almost as large as the average concentration. So you might come in way under or way over. There’s no way to know until you test.
Even after this significant change in testing thresholds, some athletes who consumed cannabis were still going to get caught, largely because of those already discussed idiosyncratic factors around THC elimination. However by August, 2022, even that didn’t really matter anymore, as the new cannabis schedule of sanctions went into place, dramatically diminishing the consequences for testing positive for cannabis.
It is not a shock that the governing board of Division III, which is composed of representatives across the country and which has to seek consensus among diverse views, took a compromise position.
What is surprising is that the compromise position they identified is so lenient on cannabis use. They effectively removed any competition sanction for a positive cannabis test among athletes (assuming the respective member institution doesn’t choose to make a fuss).
I think we all recognize that reducing restrictions on cannabis in collegiate sports triggers a lot of the same political conflicts that develop around the passage of state-level cannabis recreational-use laws. There are some people whose opinions are primarily shaped by research into questions about the potential harms and benefits of cannabis and the tradeoffs in swapping cannabis use for the use of other substances. Some people don’t care about that and want it legalized on libertarian grounds. Some people are set to make a lot of money through cannabis recreational use legalization, and some are likely to lose a lot of money through recreational use legalization - so you can imagine where those parties tend to settle on issue. And there are some people who simply view cannabis use as a moral issue. For them, views informed by scientific research, or political philosophies, or market considerations, are not relevant.
The Reverse-Gateway Drug
The Gateway Drug idea is one of those concepts that has popular resonance but is not taken seriously by medical researchers. (The current research paradigm is something called Common Liability for Addiction or CLA and if you like medical research rabbit-holes, dude, dive in. It is fascinating.)
If you went to high school in the United States, you know the Gateway Drug idea: ‘Use of cannabis primes the user to seek-out drugs that have even stronger properties (either psychoactive drugs like hallucinogens or euphoric and pain-reducing drugs like opioids)’.
There is reason to believe the Gateway Drug idea gets things backwards. If individuals prone to seeking and abusing substances like opioids – those coping with acute or chronic pain, or managing mental health issues related to anxiety – can access cannabis as an alternative, they may become less, not more, likely to abuse hard drugs. That appears to be view of the NCAA’s CSMAS and Division III:
18.4.1.5.2.1…If a student-athlete who previously tested positive for a substance in the banned drug class narcotics test positive for the use of a substance in the banned drug class cannabinoids, they will be subject to the penalties set forth in Bylaw 18.4.1.5.3.
Bylaw 18.4.1.5.3 is the cannabis section. Why make this explicit statement when it could be logically deduced from the context? It suggests the NCAA expects this to happen frequently and they want to be clear that if a student-athlete can replace narcotics with cannabis, the NCAA will book that as a win and and will apply the extremely lenient penalty framework associated with cannabis use.
On CLA: Vanyukov MM, Tarter RE, Kirillova GP, Kirisci L, Reynolds MD, Kreek MJ, Conway KP, Maher BS, Iacono WG, Bierut L, Neale MC, Clark DB, Ridenour TA. Common liability to addiction and "gateway hypothesis": theoretical, empirical and evolutionary perspective. Drug Alcohol Depend. 2012 Jun.
This should be in a document posted online. Search for something like ‘[Your school’s name here] Athletics Drug Testing and Alcohol Education.’
Generally, if the student athlete makes the disclosure before being notified of a scheduled drug test, then it is considered voluntary, even if other circumstances seem to stretch the meaning of what we normally mean by voluntary. Some policies limit the number of times an athlete can use the amnesty provision.
What the NCAA enforces is what you’d expect. They go after schools that don’t follow their own drug testing policies when the matter is a student-athlete who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs but was still permitted to compete.
I also can’t even find a single case where a school was sanctioned by the NCAA for violating the privacy of student-athletes by inappropriately publicizing violations of the substance use/abuse policy. Which happens a lot.
One common loophole is a clause in a drug testing policy that says something like ‘Nothing contained in this Policy shall be construed as preventing a head coach from imposing a more severe sanction than those provided in this Policy.’ That’s from Hopkins by the way, which as far as I know has NOT had a lot of problems in this area.
How that sort of policy squares with a safe harbor/amnesty policy is unclear, and no doubt there are coaches that claim that they are free to violate the amnesty clause and suspend the athlete anyway, if not for drugs, then for ‘conduct detrimental to the team…(because they used drugs)’ or a similar formulation.
I think that interpretation is fairly widespread among coaches, and mostly bonkers. If a safe-harbor provision can be circumvented, than any protection (not already enshrined in state or federal law) can be circumvented using the same logic.
On privacy: In your school’s student-athlete handbook, you should be able to find several clauses that state your rights to privacy in substance-use testing. Usually these handbooks will note that - for instance - it is up to you whether you want to tell your parents or others in the community if you are being sanctioned for violation of the substance-use policy. It is easy for coaches to make a farce of these provisions, if they choose to, but doling out the punishments in situations where they know your parents, and other parents, and others in the community, are most likely to be watching.
Unless the policy violation gave your program a competitive advantage, in which case expect a visit from the NCAA.
You are unlikely to prevail on appeal, and even if you do, your suspension might run its course before the appeal judgement is delivered. Justice delayed, and all that.
In the mid-1980's, at least in D3, cannabis was the only banned substance that required two positive tests to trigger a sanction/DQ. The rationale was that a single positive test could plausibly be the result of second-hand exposure. Also, the NCAA explicitly stated that only those who placed in the top four at nationals would be tested.