MLB to test for opioids after Skaggs’ death
SAN DIEGO – In the wake of one of the game’s greatest tragedies, and with a potential crisis always looming on the horizon, Major League Baseball and the Players’ Association came together for a most important and too-rare occurrence.
A humane and pragmatic solution before a potential epidemic strikes the game.
The overdose death of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, who was found to have opioids – including this nation’s silent killer, fentanyl, in his system when he passed – was a wake-up call that jolted the sport throughout July and August.
The joint MLB-MLBPA solution, announced Thursday at baseball’s winter meetings, might not be perfect but attacks the problem wisely from multiple angles.
A positive test for opioids will result not initially in suspension but rather a treatment-based approach and evaluation. This is the only sane course of action: In a sport where ligaments stretch and tear and body parts are reconstructed whole through significant surgeries – procedures we as rank-and-file citizens brush off as “just another Tommy John surgery” – the prescription and use of opioids are undeniable. Oxycodone, Percocet, Vicodin – for the rank and file, they are occasional devils to dance with.
For professional athletes, they are often a necessary evil for professional survival.
For close observers of the game, it only took a few minutes of reflection to remember that Skaggs, 27 when he died, had Tommy John surgery five years earlier. While so much remains unknown about his path to apparent addiction, it’s virtually impossible to separate these factors.
Meanwhile, the game’s “decriminalization” of marijuana is nearly an equally wise and important step – one that puts it ahead of its biggest professional peer.
It is objectively true that weed is a far safer option than opioids and so many other controlled substances to control pain, anxiety and an assortment of other maladies that affect Americans – and pro athletes in a far more disproportionate fashion. Meanwhile, an NFL landscape in which pain is imminent and crippling injury a likelihood still places canniboids on its banned list. The league said last spring an exploratory look at alternative pain methods, including marijuana.
It’s too little, and certainly too late. “Cannabis saved my life, period, and it could help a lot of other players,” veteran lineman Kyle Turley, who played eight years in the NFL, told the Los Angeles Times in September.
MLB players on 40-man rosters have been exempt from marijuana testing, but a slew of minor leaguers are popped on an annual basis, and the nebulous status of 40-man-or-not should not be the defining status for whether a player can indulge – or self-medicate – with a drug legal in 12 states and D.C. and decriminalized or legal for medical purposes in 21 others.
Baseball got with the times. And time will tell if it tacked correctly on opioids. But the game had to do something, and this seems a positive first step.