If you’ve been watching closely, we’ve been dropping hints about the worst-kept secret in the NFL—a lot of football players consume marijuana. Most teams don’t care all that much if their players use it either, which is why owners have already prepared to concede cannabis regulations ahead of the upcoming Collective Bargaining Agreement with its players.
All this begs the question: If so many players use cannabis now, despite it being against the current rules, how do they all get away it? Luckily, former New York Giants running back Tiki Barber recently shed light on it all in an interview with FOX Business. The drug tests, according to Barber, were extremely easy to beat.
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“We always used to call it like the ‘dummy test’ because you know when the test is going to happen so just be clean and as long as you’re not in the program you can probably get away with it even if they technically know that it’s happening,” Barber told FOX Business.
Barber has a closer insight between cannabis and football than most. The former player has since launched an investment firm that assists marijuana startups navigate the beginning tangles of such a nascent industry. The company is called Grove Group Management, which Barber started with business partner Kevin Shin, and has already begun working with a number of a small businesses.
“It’s simply a business opportunity,” Barber said. “We wanted to put a group together that could attack this cannabis space in an intelligent way that makes sense for not only the business opportunity but also for minority communities and create a message of social progress.”
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But Barber, who uses CBD-infused products to manage residual pain from his playing days, believes the NFL needs to change its approach in letting players use marijuana for pain management.
“It’s an evolving conversation with the league and I’m sure come 2020 or 2021 with a new collective bargaining agreement going to be negotiated, it’s going to be a talking point. Guys are tired of managing their pain with things that are going to destroy their livers and make their lives down the line very untenable in some ways,” Barber said.
