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Olympic Weed Disqualification Threshold Gets Way Higher


July 18, 2013 | Andy Cush

Used to be, you only had to have 15 nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood to get disqualified from the Olympics. Just ask Ross Rebagliati, who had his gold medal in men’s snowboarding taken away in 1998 for testing positive for 17.8 ng/ml. Now, in a move designed to punish only those who use the extremely powerful performance enhancing drug cannabis during the games, World Anti-Doping Agency, the group that oversees drug use in the Olympics, has raised the limit to 150 ng/ml, ten times what it was before—even Michael Phelps can swing that.

According to Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, you’d have to be a “pretty dedicated cannabis consumer” to hit that level. Not that a dedicated cannabis consumer should be precluded in any way from wining a medal–but progress, people. Progress.