{"id":373204,"date":"2021-01-14T09:38:21","date_gmt":"2021-01-14T17:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.tcpcharms.com\/bjpenn\/?p=373204"},"modified":"2021-01-14T09:38:21","modified_gmt":"2021-01-14T17:38:21","slug":"ufc-usada-will-no-longer-punish-athletes-for-marijuana-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.tcpcharms.com\/bjpenn\/mma-news\/ufc\/ufc-usada-will-no-longer-punish-athletes-for-marijuana-use\/","title":{"rendered":"UFC, USADA will no longer punish athletes for marijuana use"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The UFC and its official anti-doping partner, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), have made a long overdue to change to their positions on marijuana use among professional fighters.<\/p>\n<p>On Thursday, the promotion and the agency announced that, going forward, fighters will not be penalized if carboxy-THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, appears on their drug tests.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhile we want to continue to prevent athletes from competing under the influence of marijuana, we have learned that blood and\/or urine levels of carboxy-THC have little-to-no scientific correlation to impairment,\u201d UFC senior vice president of athlete health and performance Jeff Novitzky said in a statement. \u201cTHC is fat soluble, meaning that once ingested, it is stored in fatty tissues and organs in the body and can be released back into the blood or urine, sometimes long after ingestion.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe bottom line is that in regards to marijuana, we care about what an athlete consumed the day of a fight, not days or weeks before a fight, which has often been the case in our historic positive THC cases,\u201d Novitzky added.<\/p>\n<p>While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it&#8217;s worth noting that athletic commissions, which operate separately from the UFC and USADA, can still issue fines and <a href=\"http:\/\/staging.tcpcharms.com\/bjpenn\/mmanews\/nick-diaz-suspended-5-years-by-nsac-for-marijuana-use-at-ufc-183\/\">suspensions<\/a> if fighters test positive for marijuana.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to <a href=\"https:\/\/mmajunkie.usatoday.com\/2021\/01\/ufc-usada-declare-marijuana-no-longer-violates-anti-doping-policy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MMA Junkie<\/a>, Novitzky encouraged fighters to keep that in mind, but also emphasized that the UFC and USADA will lobby commissions to affect change.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI would caution everybody to temper their enthusiasm about this because we still have the commission factor here, but we are actively working on that,\u201d Novitzky told MMA Junkie. \u201cWe are educating, informing, lobbying them, and I hope not too far in the near future that we can get uniformity across all the rules as it relates to marijuana because I think it would certainly be a benefit to the athletes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Do you think this was the right move by the UFC and USADA?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The UFC and its official anti-doping partner, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), have made a long overdue to change to their positions on marijuana use among professional fighters. On Thursday, the promotion and the agency announced that, going forward, fighters will not be penalized if carboxy-THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, appears on their [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54430,"featured_media":373205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[39610],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v19.7 (Yoast SEO v19.14) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>UFC, USADA will no longer punish athletes for marijuana use | BJPenn.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The UFC and its official anti-doping partner, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), have changed their position on marijuana use.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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