Last night's episode of Weediquette looked at how NFL players use marijuana to potentially treat and prevent CTE-related injuries. Weediquette host Krishna Andavolu talked to us about his experience making the episode, as well as how it might have changed his relationship to one of America's favorite pastimes. Read an edited and condensed version of his thoughts below.
At first blush, football and weed seem culturally antitheticalwar enacted on a playing field vs. "Peace and love, let's smoke a joint." But anecdotally speaking, many NFL players smoke pot. It's an open secret that everyone knows about. It's banned by the NFL, but the league only tests before the season begins, which means that if you piss clean that one time, you can smoke weed after the game and after practice.
In Wednesday's episode, we looked into how marijuana could potentially act as a preventative treatment for CTE, a neurodegenerative brain disease caused by repeated collisions to the head. Pot is empirically known as a neuroprotectant, and the way that we see it help people who suffer from epilepsy suggests that it can help the neurons actually protect themselves.
NFL player Eugene Monroe, who at the time of filming played for the Baltimore Ravens, got in touch with me on Twitter. He was the only current NFL player who was advocating openly for legal pot as a medicine, so his journey becomes our journey, in a sense. He loves footballloves playing it, loves hitting people, loves the competition, loves the spotlight. He's been playing since he was 11, but he knows that the toll he's taking on his head and his brain might mean that his life could be ruined years down the line.
We also visit Brian Schaefering, a defensive lineman for the Cleveland Browns who Eugene played against for years and is in a terrible situation. CTE is beginning to manifest for himhe has debilitating symptoms like memory loss, cognitive impairment, and problems with impulse controland you see what his family is going through. Impulse control is a big issue with CTE, because the prefrontal cortex, which regulates impulse, is what gets damaged the most playing football. And these are huge dudes. If their impulses are out of control, it can be scary.
It's not a problem only affecting players on the professional level, either. For every Eugene Monroe and Brian Schaefering, there are hundreds of kids who played through high school and college and didn't make it into the pros subjecting themselves to the same kinds of injuries.
The end of football's reign as America's sport of choice is in the tea leaves. Boxing was once more beloved by Americans than football. Today, we look at boxing as a brutal sport, one that leaves men battered and beaten physicallyand mentallylong before their time. For decades, fewer and fewer kids have picked up boxing gloves as an after-school activity, and the same thing is beginning to happen in football. The kids of the players I spoke to had seen what the sport had done to their fathers and told me they didn't want to end up like that. They were planning to go into another line of work.
It's in the NFL's own interest to be at the forefront of testing weed as neuroprotectors. Anything that can be done to better protect players and make the sport safer, thereby encouraging a younger generation to get involved, will only serve to protect their bottom line. So why does the league categorically deny that pot could have any preventative or helpful effects?
We talked to ESPN columnist Pablo Torre who told us simply that weed is still scary to middle America. The NFL makes billions of dollars selling its product to middle America, and it doesn't want to jeopardize that business model. Tracing marijuana's move to the mainstream, you see it intersect ...
