According to reports, the NBA may have suspended drug testing and players will no longer be tested for cannabis and other recreational drugs when the season ends next month. The NBA will continue to test for performance-enhancing drugs however.
The head of the NBA’s players union is also reportedly joining the board of a major marijuana company.
Michele Roberts, who has served as the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) since 2014, will be the first female board member of the national cannabis company Cresco Labs according to the firm.
Roberts said that she will help to advance Cresco’s “distinctive brands of high quality products and services, particularly those focused on the promise held by medicinal cannabis to treat conditions and illnesses where more traditional protocols have not met the patients’ needs.”
In 2018 Roberts said of cannabis that she felt “there are substantial signs that support its efficacy and the value that it has for us, especially pain management.”
“We’re in talks with the league to see where we can go with it,” she said at the time. “The obvious future is that marijuana will be decriminalized probably throughout the country in short order.”
“It’s something that we are talking to Michele Roberts and the players association about, about what our policy should be,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in 2019. “I think it’s not as much about what guys do in the summer. If they want to smoke pot in the summer, whatever. It’s legal in a lot of states, to your point. No issue. I do think there’s a little bit of concern about some of the pot smoking in-season.”
