By TIM REYNOLDS – AP Basketball Writer

The NBA has agreed to not randomly test players for marijuana this season, a continuation of the policy that was put in place last year for the COVID-19 “restart bubble” and has remained since.

Drug testing will continue for things such as human growth hormone and performance-enhancers, along with what the league calls “drugs of abuse” — such as methamphetamine, cocaine and opiates. But the league’s agreement with the National Basketball Players Association over random marijuana tests will continue for at least another season.

“We have agreed with the NBPA to extend the suspension of random testing for marijuana for the 2021-22 season and focus our random testing program on performance-enhancing products and drugs of abuse,” NBA spokesman Mike Bass said Wednesday.

The agreement was revealed to players in a memo from the union, the details of which were first reported by ESPN. The league suspended testing in March 2020 when play was suspended in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, then agreed with the players to test for performance-enhancers in the bubble at Walt Disney World that summer.

But marijuana wasn’t on that list, wasn’t tested for last season and now won’t be this season either.

Decriminalizing marijuana has been a major topic at the government level for years, as has been the case in the sports world as well. Earlier this year, American sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson was left off the U.S. team’s Olympic roster following a positive test for marijuana, costing her a chance at running on the 4×100 relay team in Tokyo, in addition to her spot in the 100-meter individual race.

After Richardson’s suspension was announced, two members of Congress — U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., — wrote U.S. and global anti-doping leaders to say in part that “the ban on marijuana is a significant and unnecessary burden on athletes’ civil liberties.”

More than half of the states in the U.S. have decriminalized possessing small amounts of marijuana.

But between pliés and pirouettes, Doug Goodwin, the team’s director of high school relations, called CJ’s father, Curtis, and everything fell apart.

Auburn had been CJ’s dream school for as long as he could remember. He loved the campus, loved the Tiger blue and orange, loved the rivalry with Alabama. But after a dominant senior season as a safety at Warner Robins High School in Georgia, he barely was being recruited.

His father sent his film to Auburn coaches on a whim. The Tigers thought he was such a steal, they offered him a roster spot in January and said he could play his way into a scholarship. Word spread, and Warner Robins started to celebrate its prized defensive back.

And then the questions started: How would Auburn handle CJ’s medical condition, epilepsy, and the medication he takes to control it, a hemp-based cannabis oil?

In April, Goodwin asked for Harris’ complete medical records. He called back weeks later, in the middle of ballet. CJ couldn’t come to Auburn if he kept taking the cannabis oil, he told Curtis.

“He said, ‘It hurts us because we really like CJ as a player and he was going to do good things for us,’ ” Curtis Harris told The Washington Post in an interview.

Auburn players run through drills during NCAA college football practice, Friday, Aug. 3, 2018, in Auburn, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)

Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said in June that Harris’s medication was not what caused the football team to withdraw the roster invitation.

“He wasn’t cleared by our medical staff. That was really the bottom line,” Malzahn said. “It didn’t have anything to do with anything else like some people reported.”

CJ had his first seizure as a seventh grader in 2013 and didn’t have another until three years later, when he was a sophomore in high school. But when the episodes returned, he’d sometimes have multiple seizures each month.

During one episode, he fell while strolling down the sidewalk and cut his head. Curtis rushed his son to the hospital, where CJ had another.

“If you see your child have a seizure, it’s hard to watch,” Curtis said. “You don’t know what’s going on. You just want it to stop.”

Doctors prescribed Keppra, an anticonvulsive medication, but the substance made Harris irritable. Curtis dropped his son off at school each day and stared at his phone until Warner Robins’ lunch period hoping he wouldn’t get a call from the school nurse. Mornings were CJ’s most vulnerable time.

Doctors kept upping his doses – at one point, he took four pills in the morning and two at night, and a missed dose could result in more episodes – but the seizures continued.

Desperate for a better solution, CJ switched to cannabis oil, which he squirts beneath his tongue with a syringe and waits for it to dissolve, in January 2017. He takes a dose every six hours. He hasn’t had an episode since. Doctors were so pleased with the results, they told him to keep playing football and there was no reason he couldn’t play in college.

“Any time you have a situation like that, you got to be concerned about it, but I never, not one time, saw anything close to him having any sort of episode or health problem,” Warner Robins coach Mike Chastain told The Post. “When you get that paperwork in, you’re a little concerned, but I never had any problems with him at all.”

Still, CJ wasn’t getting much recruiting attention, unusual for a defensive back who stands 6-foot-1, weighs 201 pounds, runs the 40-yard dash in 4.58 seconds and excelled both defensively and as a running back for one of Georgia’s top teams.

“I couldn’t believe none of the college coaches would recruit him,” Curtis said. “He’s a good kid. He’s a great student, teachers love him, he’s a great player, got the size. I had no idea why no one was coming to talk to him.”

Neither did Auburn – which knew about his epilepsy diagnosis when it offered him a roster spot, Curtis said – until it reviewed his medical records.

That night after ballet practice, Curtis stood in the doorway of CJ’s bedroom for 20 minutes trying to find the words to tell his son his college football dream was over.

“Once he told me that, all my dreams were crushed,” CJ said. “I knew, if Auburn was my dream school and they won’t let me play, none of the other schools would take me either.”

The NCAA bans consumption of THC, the active chemical in marijuana and hemp that causes a high. It classifies the substance in its drug-testing handbook as an “illicit drug” and does not have a medical exemption, even though medical marijuana is legal when prescribed by a doctor in Georgia and Alabama, where Auburn in located.

The father and son spent the summer traveling to recruiting camps around the South hoping another coach would think enough of CJ’s talent to fight the NCAA. They went to camps at Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Miami. At each university, coaches told CJ pretty much the same thing: “I hope they clear you, and we’ll talk.”

“It’s kind of heartbreaking when I hear it,” CJ said. “They like me during the drills, but they hear my story and they say, ‘That’s too bad.’”

By mid-July, Curtis was tired of hearing it. He took CJ to a family doctor to get tested for THC, hoping just maybe he’d test below the 15 nanograms per milliliter threshold proscribed by the NCAA.

Cannabinoids “were present,” the doctor wrote in the test results, a copy of which was provided to The Post, “but no THC metabolite is detected even down to the cut off of 15ng/ml and below.”

“I was thinking, all my prayers, God answered them,” CJ said when he read the results. “I thought I was clear. I didn’t think the NCAA would have a problem.”

And the NCAA indeed doesn’t have a problem, but college coaches still do. Multiple recruiters have told Curtis they risk too much offering CJ a roster spot when the test was conducted by a family doctor and not by a lab that works with the NCAA.

That leaves the Harris family hamstrung; the NCAA contracts with anti-doping agency Drug Free Sport to administer its banned substances policy, and Drug Free Sport does not test individual athletes.

“We are essentially client driven,” said Mark Bockelman, the agency’s vice president of collegiate and amateur sport. “We do not take walk-in individuals to do testing.”

Additionally, the NCAA only accepts test results from World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratories. There are only two such labs in the United States, one in Salt Lake City and one in Los Angeles.

“If the NCAA will test him and clear him, then coaches will come recruit him,” Curtis Harris said. “It’s easy for the coaches to blame the NCAA right now and for the NCAA to blame the coaches.”

In the meantime, CJ enrolled at East Coast Prep in Monterey, Massachusetts, for this school year, where he can take college-level courses, play a full football season and retain all four years of NCAA eligibility while waiting for some sort of official green light or for a coach to offer a roster spot while allowing him to take his medication.

“Every day I wake up,” he said, “and the first thing that comes to my mind is that I have to be ready for that call from a college coach and I pray that someone takes a chance on me.”

There was a time when Elon Musk’s live-streamed puff of marijuana would have only enhanced the image of an iconoclastic business magnate who can’t be bothered by social conventions in his quest to change the world. But an ill-advised tweet last month by the Tesla Inc. CEO led to serious questions about his stability and self-medication, changing the narrative in ways he seems not to have grasped.

“It’s particularly troubling given the issues that he has had already,” said Kabrina Chang, an associate professor at the Boston University Questrom School of Business, who studies corporate ethics and labor laws. “If I were a board member or investor, this would not give me a ton of confidence that he’s moving in that direction. It does not seem like forward progress in terms of governance and professionalism of Tesla.”

Musk, 47, sipped whiskey during a more than 2 1/2-hour podcast with comedian Joe Rogan late Thursday that touched on topics from flame throwers and artificial intelligence to the end of the universe. While he said he was “not a regular smoker of weed,” he took a drag from what Rogan described as a blunt containing tobacco mixed with marijuana, which is legal in California.

“You want some of it? You probably can’t because stockholders, right?” Rogan asked. Musk replied “I mean it’s legal, right?” and then took a drag.

Musk is under pressure to show competence. His spur-of-the-moment tweet that he planned to take Tesla private, only to drop the idea a little more than two weeks later, drew shareholder lawsuits and an investigation by federal securities regulators. His past jokes about tweeting after taking Ambien and drinking wine didn’t seem so funny anymore, and he defended his use of the prescription sleep aid in a New York Times interview.

Just hours after Musk finished smoking marijuana in the interview streamed live online, it was confirmed that both his chief accounting officer and head of human resources were leaving Tesla. The company’s shares fell 6.3 percent to $263.24, the lowest close since April 2, and have plunged about 30 percent since the day of his initial take-private tweets.

See story: Tesla Erupts in Chaos as Executives Leave, Musk Tokes Up

“The use of recreational drugs, legal or not, goes against the unspoken rules of being a public CEO,” Gene Munster, a managing partner at venture capital firm Loup Ventures and a longtime Tesla supporter, wrote Friday. Musk’s actions are making it “harder to support Tesla as a company,” even as the fundamentals are improving, Munster said.

Even in the cannabis industry, smoking weed as a CEO or top executive in a non-recreational setting is seen as unprofessional, Chris Walsh, founder and vice president of the publication Marijuana Business Daily, said in an interview. In the early days of the industry, it might have been common for people to use their product in a work setting, but those days have mostly passed, he said.

Getting high in an interview would be a non-starter, agreed Derek Peterson, CEO of Terra Tech Corp., which runs Blum retail stores in California and Nevada selling recreational and medicinal cannabis products. His employees aren’t allowed to use marijuana in the workplace and there’s a clear policy to discourage abuse, even though it’s the company’s product line.

“I’ve been a CEO of our company since 2010 and I can’t think of a single time that I did that, to be frank, just because I put a significant separation in between my work and my social time,” Peterson said. “Especially in light of what he’s going through right now, from an optics perspective, I think those are the times you need to kind of hunker down and play a little bit of defense and not give any more to the naysayers.”

So far, legal precedent has favored a company’s right to fire an employee for testing positive for or using marijuana in a workplace, even when it’s been prescribed by a doctor, Chang said. That’s because while the drug is legal in some states, it remains illegal under federal law.

Tesla board members didn’t respond to requests for comment on Musk’s marijuana use. In a blog post announcing a series of promotions late Friday to fill several voids left by senior management departures, Musk made no reference to the episode, though he advised Tesla employees to ignore the news media and focus on Tesla’s growth.

For former Tesla production employee Crystal Guardado, the image of Musk enveloped in a cloud of smoke was particularly jarring, because she says the company fired her in last year for testing positive for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

“It was just like a slap in the face to me and my son,” said Guardado, a single mother who worked at Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory for four months before being dismissed. “Elon Musk is just smoking it out in the open, knowing that he uses his very vague drug policy as a way to fire people that are a threat to him.”

Guardado said she had previously notified Tesla of her outside-work, doctor-recommended use of drops that could make her test positive for THC. She contends that THC was used as a pretext to retaliate against her for being vocal about safety issues and supporting the United Auto Workers union.

Tesla said it hasn’t fired anyone for supporting the UAW organizing efforts. Guardado was terminated because she violated the substance abuse and testing policy, according to the company. Musk told the Guardian Friday that Tesla’s policy allows for trace amounts of THC in the body during work hours.

“The issue here is not whether smoking pot is ethical or not,” said Tae Wan Kim, an associate professor of business ethics at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. “It boils down to the basic assumption whether the CEO, as a trustee of Tesla’s stakeholders, has a duty to be aware of public reactions to his behaviors. As a free person, at least in California, Musk has right to smoke pot wherever he wants. But with his CEO hat on, he should have seen that his reactions would provoke negative impact from the Wall Street.”

The Tesla board needs to act quickly to get a handle on the situation, said Betsy Atkins, a director at companies including Volvo Cars and Wynn Resorts Ltd. The electric-car maker’s board needs to consider hiring an executive to assist with day-to-day operations, she said.

“As a board member at Tesla, it’s got to be clear to you that your CEO is in distress,” Atkins said in an interview. “It’s hard to see this behavior as other than either deliberate acting out, or a call for help. Or an, ‘I don’t give a hoot.’ It’s one of those things.”

–With assistance from Gabrielle Coppola and Dana Hull .

To contact the reporters on this story: Jeff Green in Southfield, Michigan at jgreen16@bloomberg.net, Josh Eidelson in Washington at jeidelson@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Craig Trudell at ctrudell1@bloomberg.net.

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.

CHICO — The complexities and confusion around California’s new recreational cannabis regulations were obvious during Wednesday’s employers seminar, put on by the Chico Chamber of Commerce.

With more than 90 registered, questions were varied, and anxiety sometimes obvious.

The message from consultant Adrian Hoppes of Holden Law Group of Auburn is that there are clear steps that employers can take to protect their company and employees.

One statement that made attendees gasp was that any workplace can continue to be a drug free zone, with no need to accommodate cannabis use of any employee — medical or recreational — as long as the rules are applied equally to everyone.

Employers can still have a drug-free workplace, Hoppes said.

“They can forbid medical and recreational use,” she said. “Employers do not have to accommodate use of marijuana in the workplace.”

At the top of her recommendation list is for every workplace to have a clear policy regarding drugs in the workplace, and to make sure all employees know it.

It’s not only having a binder or poster displayed but making all employees read and sign the policy.

Even before an employee comes on board, awareness about the employer’s policy can be set. An employer, Hoppes said, can require a drug test after a job offer has been made, but not before. If the drug test shows evidence of marijuana, the offer can be withdrawn without penalty.

Once someone has been hired, an employer needs to be more careful not to single out someone without cause. Companies “should not do random drug testing,” but can prohibit possession and being under the influence, Hoppes explained. Random testing is allowed for businesses governed by the Department of Transportation regulations.

“Reasonable suspicion” can be the foundation for an employer’s action, but Hoppes warns that great care needs to be taken in gathering evidence.

Hoppes said she discourages an immediate reaction of finding marijuana use occurring after an accident and termination. She said Occupational Health and Safety Administration found that employees were not reporting worker compensation injuries after using marijuana because of the threat of testing.

Helping employers support testing are a list of suggestions that build a case under “reasonable suspicion” or as she explained what would lead a reasonable person to believe an employee is under the influence.

“Establish reasonable suspicion before sending anyone to testing,” she said.

The basis is how they are performing their job. “Focus on performance.” If they are having difficulties, talk to them. Ask they how they’re feeling or what’s happened to prevent them from doing their job.

Do they smell unusual? Are they having problems speaking or walking? Is someone else at the business able to chronicle their problem as well?

Hoppes said it could be that the employee implicates themselves voluntarily, especially if they believe the law shields them through privacy or medical marijuana use.

If an employer can fulfill these suggestions, Hoppes said they can require testing, but need the employee to be driven to the testing facility.

Businesses that have federal contracts or or have federal revenue must still be drug free because marijuana is still illegal at federal levels.

“You have to make sure that employees understand they can’t smoke or use.”

There should be a written zero tolerance policy that puts all employees on notice. The message needs to be clearly stated and repeated, and the policy signed.

Employers are concerned about difficulties they may face, so Hoppes said, “Spend that $100 and call an HR company. It’ll be cheaper than a lawsuit.”

Copies of the slides from the presentation can be requested from the Chico Chamber at 891-5556.