Cramped behind a small table inside a high school in Canton, Ohio, Terrell Davis looked out among a crowd of reporters, all eager to ask about his favorite memories, about his road to the Hall of Fame and about his brief but compact career as a Denver Bronco.
For nearly an hour during that rainy afternoon in August 2017, Davis reminisced, recalling the tackle on special teams that all but earned him a spot on the roster in 1995, his 2,000-yard rushing season three years later, his signature Mile High Salute, the ACL injury that cut his career short, and, of course, that infamous migraine that couldn’t keep him out of Super Bowl XXXII or from earning the game’s MVP award.
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“I think about that moment a lot because if they had the rules in place then, I don’t go back into that game,” Davis said at the time. “And that changes a lot. Am I here? Thank God it didn’t happen like that.”
What he didn’t know then, as he waited to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame, was that a life-altering solution to his ailments would also spur his latest venture.
For years, Davis’ NFL career was defined by what he overcame to produce record numbers and Super Bowl victories, and what ultimately cut it short. But his on-field triumphs left him with persistent pain in retirement, to go along with the migraines he had experienced since he was 9 years old.
“I was constantly taking anti-inflammatories — Naprosyn and Toradol shots — and doing these things to kind of mask and help with the pain and to manage that stuff,” Davis told The Athletic last week. “… You leave football and it becomes almost like a twilight zone. It’s like this fog and haze that, not only did it hit me, but players that I’ve spoken to. It’s just weird. You just find yourself having a different level of anxiety.
“People might look at me and think that my life is all perfect. But no, I’ve dealt with that and I remember I got diagnosed and they said, ‘Well, you have a bout of social anxiety’ and they wanted to put me on medication again. I was like, ‘Nah, I’m gonna pass on that.’ Every time there’s something that’s going on, the first answer to it is to put you on meds.”
After football, Davis’ balky knee would swell up, sometimes limiting his extension to only about 45 degrees. His joints hurt, his workouts were painful and the anxiety that had built up since leaving the game failed to dissipate.
About a year ago, Davis was able to ditch anti-inflammatories he used to take daily to prevent the onset of his migraines and replaced them with cannabidiol (CBD), a nonpsychoactive compound in cannabis found to reduce inflammation, ease anxiety and provide a host of other benefits experienced by athletes and nonathletes alike.
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Davis says he’s now down to his playing weight and no longer has the chronic pain and inflammation that hindered his everyday life.
What’s more: After nearly two years of research and planning, he is a co-founder of a Colorado-based company, Defy, that will soon launch a string of products with CBD. The company’s first product line — CBD-infused sports drinks — are expected to launch in the spring and will be sold in Colorado before making their way across state lines.
“Once I tried it, it was a game-changer,” he said. “It started to improve my body, started to feel better, the inflammation in my knee and my body started to go away and I just couldn’t believe the results of it. Once that started happening, my thing just became, ‘Hey, listen, we have to share this people. We have to get the word out.’”
Davis’ foray into CBD usage was borne out of research. He and his fellow co-founders of Defy have tested various CBD products, each providing varying degrees of success and some failing to live up to the billing.
“For us, as a group, we weren’t going to do this unless we could do it in the utmost appropriate and efficient way,” Defy’s CEO and co-founder Beau Wehrle said. “We weren’t going to take any chances with inconsistencies. A lot of the industry is still new and emerging, so there’s not a lot of regulation around it and people are doing it in ways that I wouldn’t deem appropriate.”
Davis and his team say their product is unique because of the science they’ve installed on the back end. The CBD used in Defy’s products is grown in Colorado and their drinks are developed through a local lab to ensure they contain a consistent quality and quantity of CBD — 20 mg of CBD per beverage, with no tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component of cannabis.
“That is unique in the marketplace,” Wehrle said. “I would say that 99.9 percent of (CBD products) have traces of THC, and what people don’t understand is that if you take enough of it, that can affect you. So we wanted to eliminate that aspect.”
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That zero percent is critical, especially in marketing its products to current NFL players, who are still beholden to the league’s strict drug policy. Although the NFL and its players’ union have said they would consider amending their drug policies when science warrants it, they currently prohibit players from having more than 35 nanograms of THC per millimeter of urine. It’s unlikely players could consume enough THC from CBD products that contain traces of the psychoactive compound, but any amount could be a concern in a league in which contracts are typically not fully guaranteed and careers are generally shorter.
The NBA, by comparison, has a more stringent THC limit (15 ng/mL), but the structure of NBA contracts (fully guaranteed) and the length of its season (82 games) result in a much more lax penalty system. Major League Baseball players have a 50 ng/mL limit and are tested only when there’s reasonable cause, while the NHL doesn’t even test for marijuana and the World Anti-Doping Agency last year changed its policy to remove CBD from its list of banned substances. Years earlier it raised its THC limit to 150 ng/mL.
And last July, the BIG3 became the first U.S professional sports league to allow its players to consume CBD.
“As a testament to our relationship with our players, we listened to their feedback on CBD, as well as feedback from professionals in the regulatory and CBD industry, and decided to take this major step to support their health,” BIG3 co-founder and co-CEO Jeff Kwatinetz said in a statement.
While more than half of the United States has legalized marijuana for medicinal and/or recreational purposes, the confusion over cannabis and, specifically, CBD’s place in the legal spectrum has been muddied.
Marijuana is not the same as hemp, a distinction that was emphasized last December when the 2018 Farm Bill legalized the cultivation of hemp, defined as having no more than 0.3 percent THC.
The 2018 Farm Bill was critical in validating the booming hemp-based CBD industry and is expected to open up avenues for more research and clinical trials.
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But a gray area remains: CBD can be found in both hemp and marijuana, and the latter remains a Schedule I drug, a classification that also includes heroin and LSD. So CBD derived from marijuana remains federally illegal, while CBD derived from hemp is not, by association, a scheduled drug.
“People get confused because they think that the Farm Bill had blanket legalization for everything hemp. But really what the Farm Bill did is just legalize the production and cultivation of hemp,” explained Shawn Hauser, a partner with Vicente Sederberg LLC, a Denver-based marijuana law firm. “The sale of any consumable product or cosmetic or device has always been and will continue to be under the purview of the FDA. It’s their job to regulate anything in interstate commerce that humans or animals can consume.
“So even though we can grow hemp and hemp-derived CBD legally now because the Farm Bill removed hemp from the (Controlled Substances Act), the sale of consumable CBD beverage products still have to comply with (the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act), and that’s true of any other cannabinoid, any other food product.”
It’s the position of the FDA that CBD cannot be legally sold as a food, which includes beverage or dietary ingredient. But some states, including Colorado, have amended their food and drug laws to make sure that hemp-derived ingredients are allowed.
Defy will begin its jump into the industry in the state where Davis became a Broncos legend, creating an online presence while first selling its products in Colorado grocery stores, fitness centers and supplement chains.
“In terms of national distribution, we’re keeping our fingers closely to the pulse of what’s happening on a national level as each state develops their own regulations around CBD,” said Defy COO and co-founder Megan Bushell. “We do intend to eventually make our product available to consumers across the nation. However, we do so within compliance of each state’s regulations.”
While CBD is in its infancy with regards to regulation, it has spurred a flourishing market that continues to rise at jaw-dropping rates. Brightfield Group, a cannabis market research firm, predicted that the hemp-derived CBD market could reach $22 billion by 2022.
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But research has been limited, resulting in very few clinical studies on CBD. The anecdotal evidence, however, is overwhelming and seemingly growing by the day — especially for athletes seeking non-habit-forming alternatives to treat their sport-related injuries.
“As the years went on, especially when I was getting near retirement age and I was having to take anti-inflammatories twice a day, yeah, I was concerned about my kidneys,” Davis said. “I was concerned about the long-term effects of just taking it. So sometimes I just wouldn’t even take it because I didn’t feel like it was healthy for me, and that would trigger a migraine.”
In 2016, Colorado Springs-based Realm of Caring, the nonprofit arm of local cannabis producer CW Hemp, partnered with a group of former NFL players, including former Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer, to drum up interest and fundraising for clinical studies of players’ cannabis usage and the plant’s potential health benefits.
Months earlier, the NFL Players Association formed a pain management committee with players past and present, as well as medical experts and researchers, to study the issue of chronic pain. The potential benefits of marijuana and its derivatives were said to be on their long list of topics it would look into, but the union’s and the league’s stance on CBD remains unchanged.
“Whether it’s other substances, in addition to marijuana, we want to make sure that we have done the research to support a player’s use of that if that is indeed the only safe and position recommended therapy for that player,” NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith told The Athletic last year.
“So where we are right now, we’re looking at the issue of CBD — which, in its purest form doesn’t contain THC, which is the only thing that would run you afoul of the drug policy — but also looking at a lot of other therapies.”
But others believe CBD’s benefits could go well beyond the day to day pain management.
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Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard psychiatry professor, penned an open letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to urge him to eliminate marijuana testing of its players. He also encouraged Goodell to support research of the potential benefits of cannabinoids in preventing concussion symptoms and maybe even the onset of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a disease Davis has said “we’re all scared” of in retirement from the NFL.
Maybe CBD, which is found to have neuroprotective properties, could be a help. But until then, Defy is looking to join the push for research and commission clinical trials and studies with collegiate athletes to learn more about its potential benefits.
“We want to work with the NFL. That’s my dream,” Davis said. “That’s my goal, to make this mainstream and to make this available to professional sports and be the advocate for that, to make it known that CBD is a safe and a natural ingredient.”
Until the trials produce concrete evidence, the NFL may not change its stance. But Davis plans to reach out to the league because he believes his NFL story might have ended a little differently had CBD been available to him during his time with the Broncos.
“There’s no question I believe that it would have helped that,” he said.
Perhaps his career would have lasted longer.
Perhaps it can still extend the careers of others.
(Photo: Ron Chenoy / USA TODAY Sports)
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