SNoop Dogg urged the NBA and NFL on Monday to stop punishing players for consuming marijuana, saying they are lagging behind the other two U.S. professional sports leagues when it comes to adopting a more drug testing policy. progressive.
Jimmy Kimmel live! guest host Stephen A. Smith, who has had a habit of begging athletes to “stay out of the weeds,” first asked the rapper if he agreed.
“I agree with your position when it comes to athletes who have curators, rules and regulations and tests … things that could keep them from making money. But when I talk to artists and people like me, we don’t have any curators, we don’t have any, so we don’t do drug tests, ”said Snoop Dogg, who in 2015 launched his own brand of cannabis products.
Athletes, he continued, “can hang out with rappers, though [they] I can’t do what rappers do. “
Smith followed up asking if it makes sense for professional sports leagues to do drug testing and punish athletes with fines and suspensions if they test positive.
Not at all, said Snoop Dogg.
“What happens is you have these players who take these pills and become addicted to these pills, and it still doesn’t provide them with the relief they need in terms of the pain or what they’re going through,” he said. .
Marijuana, in any form, would do the job without the side effects of painkillers, he reasoned.
“I do it in sports because baseball doesn’t test for marijuana [and] hockey doesn’t test marijuana, so the same thing should happen with basketball and football. “
Last month there was a notable case of an athlete who did not take a drug test when American sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson was effectively banned from competing in the Olympics because he had smoked marijuana after learning that his biological mother had died.
The incident was immediately satirized by The onion, who declared, “The dream crushed with trivial shit represents the nation better than the gold medal that could ever have been made.”