Riley Cote says the NHL is a league full of potheads. The former Philadelphia Flyers bruisers said in an interview with Sportsnet that around half of the hockey league’s players use marijuana, and many do every day.
Cote retired from the league in 2010 and was an assistant coach for a Flyers’ minor league affiliate, but he left coaching earlier this year and now works primarily in raising awareness for the use of marijuana medically with his Hemp Heals Foundation. He says there should be more awareness and acceptance of cannabis use for professional athletes, and spoke about the frequency with which he saw other NHL players using the drug.
The NHL’s drug policy is much different than that of the NFL in that marijuana use is not specifically banned, though it is still frowned upon. Cote said he used marijuana to cope with the physical and mental stress that came with being a fighter in the NHL, and that many do the same thing.
“I’d quietly use it as an ally of mine. It helped me manage anxiety [and] pain,” Cote said. “There was no physical addiction. It just made me feel better.”
Cote estimated about half the league uses the drug in a similar way.
“Good people break bad laws, I guess,” he says. “At least half of those guys [I competed with and against] consumed, and a fraction of those guys consumed regularly. Like, every day…. And that number is probably higher.”
While some would argue his numbers are a bit exaggerated, one important thing Cote notes is that if he did not use marijuana he would have used other drugs to ease his pain. The league’s most bruising players have long struggled with alcohol and other narcotics issues among enforcers and Cote suggests marijuana can be a non-addictive path to managing pain for players that doesn’t result to early death. Cote said that, without cannibis, he would have spent a lot of time in the league’s substance-abuse program.
In the NHL, Cote knew other enforcers who would lay awake the night before games, dripping in sweat, worrying about their next fight. Many, he added, would turn to alcohol as a coping tool. But Cote says his cannabis use helped temper those anxieties.
“We’re not selling the silver-bullet, magical cure for all,” he says. “[Cannabis] is a tool and it needs to be treated with respect…. It’s all about increasing quality of life. It’s about helping these guys wake up the next morning, where they can feel functional enough, good enough, [that] they can enjoy their family and not worry about the pain and anxiety — that vicious cycle that generally leads to mental health issues.”
Managing pain is part of the game for professional athletes, but legal painkillers can be dangerous. And the nation’s current opioid epidemic is just one aspect of that dangerous game. Cote joins a handful of other retired athletes who have extolled marijuana as an alternative for prescription drugs, but so far few active players have come out in favor of changing the rules … rules that probably prevent that kind of thing from happening in the first place.
