KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. _ NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the league's chief medical officer said Wednesday that the league would consider allowing players to use marijuana if it means helping them with pain management.
The league and NFL Players Association recently formed a committee to cooperate in the study of pain management _ including the potential use of marijuana. There are no immediate plans to allow players to use marijuana, which is banned under the league's current substance abuse program.
"There are a lot of alternative pain medications and treatments," Goodell said at the NFL owners annual spring meetings. "And those are the types of things that we want this committee to focus on, with medical experts and with medical science behind that. Of course, they will look at one of those is what role medical marijuana can have in that. That's something that will be part of those studies. But it is much broader than that."
Dr. Allen Sills, the league's chief medical officer, said the committee will look at a number of alternatives, including marijuana.
"We have charged the committee with looking at any and all strategies for treating pain," Sills said. "So, marijuana, cannabinoids, CBD _ all those things will be on the list. But we've asked them to look at it and we expect them to look at it from a very scientific and medical-driven angle, which is: What does the research show? What does the data show? What are the best treatment strategies?"
Sills added that "it's really important that we go where the science takes us here, not based on personal anecdote or opinion ... I'm much more interested in that data than I am the self-report of your Aunt Mary, who happened to use a certain home remedy. We want the data to drive us to where we need to be if we're going to recommend something from a medical standpoint."
