By Allessandra Inzinna
Anna Symonds chose soccer as her signature sport in high school. She filled her time with kicking a checkered ball around the field every season. But she believed she had found her soul sport when she found rugby in college.
Unlike soccer, rugby gave Symonds room to rage. She won a National Championship in 2014, selection to the National All-Star Division and Sydney Premiership Championship. In addition, she won three national championships with the Portland Hunters.
After a successful 20-year career in Rugby, Symonds had to learn how to manage her pain. So she delved into cannabis, which spun her into a world of advocacy and social change.
Symonds is the executive director of the Etheridge Foundation, a nonprofit supporting plant medicine treatments for opioid use disorder. She’s also an ambassador for The Last Prisoner Project, Athletes for Care, and the Concussion Project.
With a career like yours, I’m sure that injuries were common. And I’m just wondering, how did you deal with those injuries before you found cannabis?
AS: Injuries are a part of rugby that you must plan for. They’re inevitable. Even just with the amount of running, muscles are sore, but then add in all the collisions and tackles, and you’re talking a lot of mayhem on your body. I’ve got a crush injury near my ankle, which looks like a bullet wound. The flesh just got crushed in, and that’s permanent.
When you’re younger, you can recover more quickly. And I used to be able to play a game or two in a day and then go out with my team after and go out dancing and drinking, wearing heels and running around. Your body doesn’t tolerate those things as much the older you get. Luckily, I eventually started listening and paying attention to my body, and part of that was finding that cannabis helped with recovery and pain management.
Right, right. So, speaking of, what was your cannabis journey?
AS: It went from the shift of having a recreational mindset around it and enjoying it to starting to notice in my early and mid-30s that it was giving benefits. Around the end of 2012, I started to learn mixed martial arts. I trained in MMA for the next couple of years. I was still playing rugby, so my schedule was very busy. I was working and training pretty much every day of the week between the two sports. Your body is going, and dialing it back quickly is not easy. So, very small amounts of edibles would help me get to sleep and have a good quality rest.
I then dated somebody who had to have a bone marrow transplant, which was a very intense medical thing. It threatened his life, and he had to go through chemotherapy. And so he was using medical cannabis and did a ton of research. This was around 2014. And he was like there’s this compound called CBD that you should look into, I think it’d be really helpful to you.
Living in Oregon, I got an opportunity in early 2016 to start working in the cannabis industry. I really had the chance to learn a lot more about all the aspects of how people grow, everything that goes into it, and what the needs of medical patients were.
I went on to be offered a position in 2017 with East Fork Cultivars as a cannabis science educator. So at that point, I really delved into research and conferences and just
learned absolutely everything that I could in order to teach it to other people.
You started your cannabis journey using cannabis for pain while you were still playing rugby. Did that ever cause any problems for you in terms of drug tests?
AS: We weren’t drug tested for our teams or club teams. You would only be faced with that if you were part of the national pool. Specifically, the national sevens team. I was selected for a tryout camp there at the Olympic Training Center in San Diego for the sevens team and I had to be careful. I had to stop using any cannabis for a couple of weeks beforehand, just in case I got tested while I was there. I wasn’t tested, but you know, that would have
been a huge deal that would have blacklisted me from any further consideration.
What do you think of that possibility of being blacklisted and the stigma around athletes using cannabis?
AS: I mean, it’s ridiculous. If players want the ‘safe option’ where they’re not going to risk testing positive for this banned substance, they’re going to use other things like alcohol to go to sleep or treat their stress, which is much worse for the body. Or they will use pharmaceuticals
that are allowed, but they’re much worse for the body and potentially addictive. It’s horrible. It’s unfair, it’s unscientific. It’s against the interests of human health and well-being of athletes.
A lot of athletes use cannabis, about 26% according to a 2019 PLOS One study on self-identified athletes. But you’re particularly vocal about it. Why?
AS: It’s about telling the truth. It’s incredibly frustrating when you know that science is there and it’s being ignored and harming people because of it.
Separating truth from fiction is what Symonds is known for in this industry. She dedicates a lot of time to educating people about the widespread myths about CBD. Misinformation plagues the cannabis space, which is why her work of clarifying ambiguity is so essential
