College Athletes & Cannabis 2026: NCAA, NIL, State Law Stack
Cannabis for college athletes: 26% past-year use (2022-23), the NCAA D-I removal of June 2024, per-school in-season testing, NIL cannabis brand restrictions, and the legal-rec vs prohibition state-law overlay.
NCAA Past-Year Use: 22% → 25% → 26% Strong evidence
The single best longitudinal dataset on cannabis use among U.S. college athletes is the NCAA's Student-Athlete Substance Use Study, conducted in 1985, 1989, 1993, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2017, and most recently in the 2022-2023 NCAA Student-Athlete Health and Wellness Study (results released January 2024 from a representative sample of 23,272 student-athletes). Past-year cannabis use rose from 22% in 2013 to 25% in 2017 to 26% in 2022-2023. Division I use rose from 18% in 2017 to 23%, while Division III remained the highest at roughly 30%.
These figures sit below general college-population estimates of 38% (American College Health Association NCHA-III, Spring 2023) and 41% (Monitoring the Future Panel Study, 2022). Older NCAA waves (Green et al., Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, 2001) had pegged past-year prevalence at 28.4%, illustrating the often-cited 24%-to-43% range across decades and methodologies.
June 25, 2024: D-I Council Removes Cannabinoids From Postseason Testing Removed from list
On June 25, 2024, the NCAA Division I Council voted to remove cannabinoids from championship and postseason testing, effective immediately and applied retroactively to existing penalties. Council chair Josh Whitman (Illinois AD) framed the decision plainly: "The NCAA drug testing program is intended to focus on integrity of competition, and cannabis products do not provide a competitive advantage." CSMAS vice chair Deena Casiero (UConn head team physician) had said the previous year that "the previous cannabinoid policies and sanctions were not an effective deterrent to cannabinoid use… randomly testing at NCAA championships is not the best way to identify or help student-athletes with use issues."
The decision capped a multi-step liberalization. NCAA's Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports (CSMAS) had already raised the THC-COOH threshold to 150 ng/mL in February 2022 (aligning with WADA), and the December 2022 NCAA Cannabinoid Summit had reframed cannabis as a "Substance Use" matter, not a "Performance Enhancement" matter. CSMAS recommended elimination across all three divisions in September 2023. Through May 2026, Divisions II and III have not yet adopted parallel rules — though the framework precedent is now established.
Per-School Discretion + State Law Stack
Schools retain authority to test during the regular season, with school-specific penalty structures. State law layers on top. In legal-recreational states (CA, CO, MA, NY, etc.), schools have largely tolerated personal use; in prohibitionist states, school policies are typically more punitive. The same student-athlete on the same drug at the same Power-Five conference can face wildly different consequences depending on which campus they sit at — a single-test asymmetry that the June 2024 decision narrowed but did not eliminate.
Title IX Equity and Disparate Enforcement
Disparate enforcement by gender and race in NCAA cannabis sanctions has been raised in legal commentary — Vande Streek (Marquette Sports Law Review, 2022) is the most-cited Title IX-framed analysis. Limited evidence NCAA-published racial breakdowns of historic cannabis suspensions are limited; rigorous prevalence-by-race data for athletes is not yet published. The argument rests on inference from sociological research and case-level reporting rather than NCAA-released sanctions data.
NIL Deals and Cannabis Brands
Post-July 2021 NIL liberalization opened the door to athlete cannabis brand deals — in theory. In practice: federal hemp-cliff timing (November 12, 2026 under Public Law 119-37 § 781), state-law conflicts, and remaining school-level testing make this a fraught area. Several conferences have moved to restrict cannabis NIL: the Big Ten in particular has school policies discouraging cannabis-brand deals. CBD-only NIL is more common but still verifies through compliance offices on most campuses.
Transfer Portal: Cannabis Risk Crosses State Lines
State-law differences across the 24+ legal-recreational states versus prohibitionist states make cross-state transfers a meaningful policy variable. A D-I athlete in a legal-rec state at a permissive school faces near-zero NCAA risk after June 2024 — but transferring to a prohibitionist-state campus can introduce scholarship-loss risk for in-season positives under the new school's regular-season policy. Athletes considering the portal should query the receiving school's substance-use policy alongside playing-time and academic considerations.