Sports Must Embrace Pot, Ex-Basketball Player Says

(Bloomberg) -- Professional sports leagues are beginning to recognize the benefits of cannabis and will start to allow athletes to consume it “sooner than later,” according to former basketball pro Al Harrington.

Harrington, who founded pot company Viola Extracts Inc. after he retired from the National Basketball Association, said the professional sports world is beginning to recognize the benefits of cannabis for pain management and recovery, particularly the non-intoxicating compound CBD.

“I think CBD's kind of a gateway into sports,” he said Thursday in San Francisco at the Players Technology Summit presented by Bloomberg. “If the teams in these organizations know what's best for their players, they should take a deeper dive into the cannabis plant because there's something there.”

Some sports are already beginning to do that. The National Football League and the NFL Players Association have formed a joint committee to study the prospective use of cannabis to help with pain management, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship has partnered with Aurora Cannabis Inc. to study the relationship between CBD and athlete health.

Cannabis can also reduce opiate use among athletes, said Kevin Murphy, chief executive officer of Acreage Holdings Inc., who was a professional football player before switching to finance.

“Athletes, whether it's baseball, football, basketball, you name it, are under tremendous physical stress and opiates are not the salve,” Murphy said. “I personally have a very dear friend who got injured playing football and went through the protocol of taking the opiates. He hanged himself three months ago because he couldn't deal with the opiates and he ran out of money. If cannabis was in his life, I promise you he'd be living today.”

Harrington's company is named after his grandmother, who found cannabis helped her glaucoma and other ailments. He was initially opposed to pot use because he was told it was a gateway drug. “But when I got to the NBA, it was the first time that I realized that athletes can use cannabis and still be very productive,” he said. “Some of the best players on my teams were self-medicating all the time, so that's when I first realized that the stigma wasn't true.”

However, the leagues will have to manage the inevitable public reaction to athletes' cannabis use, he said.

“If cannabis goes legal and the NBA says players can consume, if Steph Curry missed 10 threes, everybody's going to say he's high,” Harrington said, referring to the Golden State Warriors guard.

Holiday Toking

With national holidays on both sides of the border, it's shaping up to be a slow week for events but a busy one for consumption.

A survey conducted for cannabis website Leafly found that 21% of Canadians plan to consume pot during the Canada Day long weekend, including 33% of millennials and 24% of Gen Xers. By gender, 25% of men and 16% of women plan to partake, and intended consumption is highest in Alberta and Atlantic Canada.

In the U.S., Americans are expected to spend more on cannabis this Fourth of July than on chicken for their barbecues, according to an analysis by regulatory compliance firm Akerna Corp. Pot sales for the week of June 28 to July 4 are expected to be 80% higher than an average week for a total of about $450 million nationally.

Upcoming Events This Week

TUESDAY 7/2

• The Natural Resources Forum hosts “Cannabis: Risk, Reward & Reality” in London, featuring speakers from GW Pharmaceuticals Plc, law firm Gowling WLG and the London Stock Exchange
• 1933 Industries Inc. reports its fiscal third-quarter results

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To contact the reporter on this story: Kristine Owram in Toronto at kowram@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brad Olesen at bolesen3@bloomberg.net, David Scanlan, Steven Frank

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