Cannabis Advertisements Hit USA Today

As medicinal cannabis becomes more and more socially
acceptable, newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times and USA
Today are pioneering the normalcy of viewing ads in major publications. This,
in large part, is due to the collaboration of advocacy group Americans For Safe
Access and the Leafly app, in an attempt to de-stigmatize cannabis.

These particular ads are targeted at the NFL, in light of
the recent cannabis arrests involving the Steelers and other teams, and the
arrests that take place every year. The ads feature slogans about back pain and
show a picture of a football player in an effort to show that in a career as
rigorous as professional sports, pain is inevitable, and these people are
medicating, not just getting high.

The ads will run in the special NFL issue of USA Today in markets involving players
in legal states. The focus is geared towards a push towards the NFL to allow players
to treat their ailments with medical cannabis. In a statement made to High Times, Leafly expressed that “we
feel that these ads will reach not only a wide audience of football fans who
may not be familiar with cannabis’ therapeutic properties, but call attention
to the pivotal crossroads the organization is currently facing and urge the
league to support medical cannabis and allow its players the choice of legal,
safe, and reasonable use of cannabis for valid medical reasons without
repercussion.”

It is still unclear what effect these ads will have, but
hopefully, even if they don’t elicit a direct response from the NFL, they will
open the eyes of many readers—not just football fans, but the huge and diverse
demographic that reads USA Today—about
the potential healing qualities of medicinal cannabis and the normalcy of using
it as a treatment.  In the future, we
suspect and hope it will be nothing but the norm to see cannabis ads of all
types in major publications.