Snoop Dogg on Monday urged the NBA and the NFL to stop punishing players for using marijuana, saying they’re lagging behind the other two major North American professional sports leagues when it comes to adopting a more progressive drug-testing policy.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! guest host Stephen A. Smith, who has made a habit of pleading with athletes to “stay off the weed,” first asked the rapper whether he agrees.
“I agree with your position when it comes to the athletes who have commissioners and rules and regulations and tests… things that could stifle them from getting their money. But when I’m speaking to entertainers and people like myself, we don’t have a commissioner, we don’t have none of that, so we don’t get drug-tested,” said Snoop Dogg, who in 2015 launched his own brand of cannabis products.
Athletes, he continued, “Can hang out with the rappers, but [they] can’t do what the rappers do.”
Smith followed up by asking whether it makes sense for professional sports leagues to conduct tests for the drug and punish athletes with fines and suspensions if they test positive.
Not at all, Snoop Dogg said.
“What happens is you have these players who take these pills, and they get addicted to these pills, and it still doesn’t give them the relief that they need as far as the pain or whatever they’re going through,” he said.
Marijuana, in whatever form, would do the job without the side effects of painkillers, he reasoned.
“I push for that in sports because baseball doesn’t test for marijuana [and] hockey doesn’t test for marijuana, so it should be the same with basketball and football.”
A high-profile instance of an athlete failing a drug test occurred last month when American sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson was effectively banned from competing in the Olympics because she had smoked marijuana after learning that her biological mother had died.
The incident was promptly satirized by The Onion, who declared, “Dream Crushed Over Trivial Bullshit Represents Nation Better Than Gold Medal Ever Could.”
