Sha’Carri Richardson looks on after winning the women’s 100 meter final at the U.S.
But shortly after he won gold in the giant slalom event, a drug test revealed 17.8 nanograms per milliliter of THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis, in Rebagliati’s system, which he still attributes to secondhand smoke.
“Cannabis back then was seen as being for losers and lazy stoners,” Rebagliati told The New York Times.
Rebagliati was initially stripped of his medal, but because cannabis had not been officially banned by the International Olympic Committee , he was ultimately able to keep the gold.
As the war on drugs was waged on America’s streets, it was also playing out in sports arenas around the world.
In 1998, the United States pledged an unprecedented $1 million to assist the IOC in its mission to eradicate drugs from elite sports.
delegation at the first official meeting of WADA, after which “WADA looked far more like the institution the United States and its other international partners called for, than the original IOC-formed WADA” according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy on the agency’s actions and accomplishments from 1993-2000.
Despite the U.S.
“In the course of our efforts to put in place an IOC ban on marijuana, athletes and sports officials at all levels—ranging from Olympians to high school coaches to youth athletes—informed ONDCP that they felt that the more urgent drug threat within the sports world was the use of performance enhancing drugs,” the ONDCP report stated.
WADA did not respond to questions from NOVA about the prohibited list or cannabis’s status on the list.
“In no circumstances is ever a performance enhancing substance.
track and field sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson delivered a show-stopping performance at the Olympic trials, followed by an emotional interview in which she said she learned the week before that her birth mother had died.
While cannabis is illegal at a federal level, medical cannabis is legal in 37 states, and cannabidiol —reportedly used by 1 in 7 Americans—is no longer prohibited by WADA.
A cannabinoid is a compound that—no matter the source—interacts with cannabinoid receptors, which are found in nearly every organ in the human body.
Since the 1998 Winter Olympics, the THC metabolite limit for Olympic athletes has been raised from 15 nanograms per milliliter to 180, purportedly to only detect in-competition use of cannabis.
However, daily consumers of cannabis accumulate THC faster than it can be removed from the body, reports Lia Tabackman for Insider Health.
According to a 2008 report on drug screening in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, cannabis can be detected in urine for up to three days after a single use.
“Alcohol is something that’s far riskier than cannabis use for health, in terms of morbidity and mortality,” Angela Bryan, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Scientific American.
In September, WADA announced that it is reviewing cannabis’s status as a prohibited substance, but that it will remain prohibited in competition through 2022.
“WADA has, for more than two decades, faithfully and obediently followed U.S.