Jerry Rice Said What We Were All Thinking: The NFL Needs Stricter Rules On Marijuana Use

Sporting News- While other players want the NFL to loosen its grip on marijuana use, Hall of Fame wideout Jerry Rice believes there should be stricter rules.

"I really think it's a behavior thing," he said Wednesday on "Sway In The Morning" when asked about players currently in trouble for testing positive. "I think also there should be more rules implemented. I mean (it's) very critical."

The NFL is already one of the toughest sports leagues when it comes to its marijuana policy. Only recently did the THC threshold change from 15 nanograms per milliliter to 30 ng/ml. For context, MLB's threshold for THC is 50 ng/ml and the World Anti-Doping Agency, which deals with the testing of Olympic athletes, is at 150 ng/ml. The NBA has remained at a 15 ng/ml threshold, but commissioner Adam Silver has said the testing isn't the highest of his concerns.

Rice believes in doing things "the right way," adding, "You have to be a professional on the football field and off the football field." He says there are "some sacrifices you have to make" as a professional athlete, and that includes quitting bad habits.




​It's about damn time someone said it. With everyone running around acting like marijuana is some harmless, recreational substance that people occasionally use to relax, we needed a person like Jerry Rice to step up to the plate and go to bat in the war on drugs. There's entire regions of our fair country legalizing the stuff and we are just going to sit around and act like the best a multi-billion dollar corporation can do is ban their employees from smoking weed? Pathetic. It's almost like the NFL doesn't care about the long term health of their players. Threatening them with nothing more than suspensions that increase in length every time they are caught? You think losing out on their livelihood is going to stop athletes from hitting the pipe from time to time? Punishments for inhaling the fumes from naturally grown plants need to be far harsher if we truly want to deter that type of behavior.

The NFL always tries to talk about the integrity of the game, but where is the integrity of the game when all they done to rid their league of pot is institute randomly administered drug tests that measure even the smallest trace of a foreign substance in a person's urine? How can an athlete truly motivate himself to drop all his bad habits when the only things at stake are his league-wide reputation and the longevity of his career? People actually want to LOOSEN the reigns on getting high?! Why don't we just grease the tracks and let them slide vein first all the way into their inevitable heroin addictions? Next thing you know they'll be trying to tell us that certain narcotics actually put the body at ease and can be beneficial to people whose job it is to repeatedly hit massive human beings at breakneck speeds. Yeaaaaah, OKAY! As far as I am concerned the only sticky-icky-icky substance that needs relaxed regulations in the NFL is the one that helps you catch footballs, right Jerry?