Let the boy smoke

On February 2, the oxymoronic International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) issued a two-year ban to a twenty-one year-old for smoking weed. After playing doubles at the University of North Carolina, Casey Kania joined the ATP’s Challenger Tour – the circuit where lower-ranked players can secure enough points to qualify for larger tournaments – where he earned a staggering $482 in winnings before being forced to pay back every cent for testing positive for THC during an on-site drug test.

When the ban was issued, Kania was ranked well outside the world’s top 1,000 in doubles. I have no doubt that he's good: playing Division I tennis (or any sport, for that matter) requires an echelon of skill and athleticism no one in my ancestral history has even come close to sniffing. But my point is that he's mostly just some guy, and not in the way that we like to civilianize celebrities into being our hypothetical friends ("they seem so normal!"; "I'd grab a beer with him!"). No, like, he's literally just a guy who loves tennis and who now can't play competitively for two fucking years because he used a drug that's legal in some capacity in nearly every state and which has been clinically proven to worsen your coordination, concentration, and reaction time – by far tennis's three most crucial skills – not bolster them. For context, every major American sports league with the exception of the NFL (shocker!) has removed marijuana from their banned substances lists. Even when weed was prohibited, it was exceedingly rare for players to be suspended for longer than a few games.

I've played tennis high on marijuana plenty of times, and it's loads of fun. Thankfully, my opponent on the other side of the net was always equally stoned, leading to a pretty thoroughly horrendous display. But if the playing field wasn't even, my money would be on the sober guy every time. Plus, it's not like Kania hotboxed his car on the way to the tournament or stomped out a roach as he walked onto the court (or maybe he did; that'd be hard).

For many tennis fans, this ban unearthed the controversy of Fernando Verdasco's two-month suspension in 2022, where traces of an ADHD medication were found in a urine sample. Apparently, Verdasco was prescribed the drug but had forgotten to renew his Therapeutic Use Exemption through the World Anti-Doping Agency. This incident sparked debate over whether amphetamines, even when prescribed by a doctor, should be allowed in professional tennis. According to several players and tennis journalists, tons of top players are prescribed Adderall – so many that it's becoming reminiscent of early-aughts cycling, an era in which, according to Lance Armstrong, you simply couldn't win without doping.

Now, I'm sure many of these players have legitimate diagnoses that necessitate stimulants to get through the day, but let me just say: I have a few friends from college who all used the same "what to say at your appointment" script they found on Reddit to get Adderall prescriptions, and, unlike professional athletes, they didn’t have arsenals of doctors at their whims. To be fair, I also have friends whom I have no desire to be around when they forget to take their Adderall.

I haven't arrived at any conclusions about what to do about amphetamines in tennis. I certainly see how they could serve as a boon to your performance, at least in the short term. But they can also lead to heart problems and pretty intense chemical dependencies when taken over the course of several years. What I do know is that we shouldn't let doin' a little weed keep people from the things they love in 2024. Let's light one up for Casey.