Runner's High by Josiah Hesse

Author:Josiah Hesse [Hesse, Josiah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

THE DOPE SHOW

Once the panel is finished, I walk across the street to visit a dispensary.

Armed with Ethan Russo’s esoteric terms like “chemovars” and “linalool,” I’m curious to test the budtender’s knowledge of plants and products (a semi-dick move, but my curiosity must be appeased). Once inside, I’m greeted by a giant display from the cannabis brand Floyd’s of Leadville, which causes me to smile. Founded by disgraced Tour de France “winner” Floyd Landis, it’s another one of the numerous marijuana companies selling pain-relieving products under the banner of a famous athlete.

The curious difference here is that Floyd Landis was busted for doping.

Not only did he confess to using steroids throughout his cycling career, but he was also the whistleblower who took down his own teammate and universally beloved sports icon Lance Armstrong.

Having never cared about the validity of athletic competition, I wasn’t that bothered by the news that Armstrong had been doping all these years (though it seems that he did destroy a lot of lives in the process). As a longtime fan of Morrissey, Louis C.K., and Michael Jackson, I know what it feels like when your heroes let you down, but I’ve never had any idols who would be scandalized by drug use. As an outsider, I’ve always been perplexed when the sports world is turned upside down by doping scandals. It’s such a different sensibility from the world I inhabit. I mean, no one really cared when Lee Child revealed he’d been smoking weed while writing the hundred-million-selling Jack Reacher novels. I can’t imagine Margaret Atwood getting bumped off the top of the New York Times bestseller list by Child and then complaining that he cheated by using cannabis and that she should be declared the official winner.

The creative world has never been concerned about such things.

No one clutched their pearls in disbelief and demanded the Rolling Stones be stripped of their Grammys after learning that Keith Richards had been on heroin when he wrote “Gimme Shelter.”

What is it that makes the sports world so different?

Like everything else in this digital age, it may just come down to branding.

“The idea that cannabis is a performance-enhancing substance is laughable, and I should know,” Floyd Landis once told me in an interview that was never published. “The anti-doping regulators take some kind of self-righteous point of view, thinking that sports are some kind of pure thing that should be held to a higher standard than everything else. At the end of the day, the Olympics, the NBA—all they care about is protecting their brand, and they perceive marijuana as representing something negative.”

While walking out of the dispensary with some edibles,* I’m reflecting on what Floyd Landis told me, wondering why sports regulators would view cannabis as something negative. I’m not naive, I get it; I grew up an evangelical Republican in the nineties, after all. It’s just that the image of the lazy, unambitious stoner is such a cartoonish and inaccurate portrayal of most cannabis users, I’m surprised it still holds such influential sway.

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