Why cannabis is still a banned Olympics substance

By Robin Levinson-King
BBC News

28 July 2021

-snip-

A 'performance enhancing' substance?

Marijuana (cannabis) has been banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) since the organisation first created its list of prohibited substances in 2004. Items on the list meet two out of three criteria:

Criteria 1: They harm the health of the athlete

Criteria 2: They are performance enhancing

Criteria 3: They are against the spirit of sport

It is the second point that people seem to take the most issue with when it comes to weed, and it has become the subject of many late-night punchlines.

"The only way it's a performance-enhancing drug is if there's a big [expletive] Hershey bar at the end of the run," joked the late comedian Robin Williams.

In 2011, Wada defended the ban on cannabis in a paper published in the journal Sports Medicine. Citing a study on marijuana's ability to reduce anxiety, Wada found cannabis could help athletes "better perform under pressure and to alleviate stress experienced before and during competition".

But those findings aren't enough to warrant concluding marijuana is a performance-enhancing drug, argues Alain Steve Comtois, director of the department of sports science at the University of Quebec at Montreal.

-snip-