New initiatives announced Monday by the NFL and the NFLPA will require every team to employ a mental health professional to work in its building and could conceivably lead to a change in the league's attitude toward marijuana as a pain management treatment.
The NFL and its players' union announced Monday the establishment of both a comprehensive mental health and wellness committee and a joint pain management committee. The latter will conduct research into pain management and alternative therapies, which could lead the league down previously unexplored roads.
"We want to explore all of the strategies that help a player deal with acute and chronic pain," Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL's chief medical officer, said in a phone interview Monday. "Some of those efforts require medication, some don't. With regard to marijuana, certainly there's a lot of discussion about not only cannabis but cannabinoid compounds, CBD, and it's something that health care providers are exploring outside of football. That type of research will certainly be part of the mission of this committee and this program."
According to the joint NFL/NFLPA announcement, the pain management committee will establish "uniform standards for club practices and policies regarding pain management and the use of prescription medication by NFL players" as well as researching various pain management methods. The establishment of that committee coincides with the establishment of a new prescription drug monitoring program to monitor all prescriptions issued to players by team physicians or outside physicians and requires every team to appoint a pain management specialist before the start of the 2019 season.