Anxiety is something every athlete, at every level, faces not only before competition, but sometimes just to get out the door.

Professional and amateurs alike suffer from nerves and, in the case of Percy Harvin, who played wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks and won a Super Bowl, this left him breathless before taking the field. Harvin told the Bleacher Report he had seven prescriptions to calm his anxiety. Marijuana was the only thing that worked.

“There’s a fallacy that elite athletes don’t have anxiety, but it’s the opposite…everyone has nerves,” says Kim Dawson, professor of exercise physiology at Wilfrid Laurier University, who’s helped train at least a dozen Olympians. She adds: “I don’t cast judgment on what anyone needs to calm themselves, I just want athletes to be aware of their process.”

Cannabis has long been touted to calm anxiety, but much of the research thus far is early stage. While cannabis companies develop R&D centres to create new products for athletes—many with a sharp focus on CBD—large swaths of the sporting community already admit to long-standing relationships with weed.

“It’s interesting, the intersection between cannabis and athletics, but I worry we’re putting the behaviour before the research,” says Dawson, striking a cautionary note on cannabis and CBD usage among athletes, and highlighting the need for more evidence. “I don’t think we fully understand what cannabis does in terms of physiology and pain management for anyone, let alone someone about to engage in a high-intensity sport.”

In the running world it’s not uncommon to meet long-distance trail runners who consume cannabis on their workouts. But they control their pace and intensity level and have relatively little to fear, unlike an NFL wide receiver, who will be pursued by men not much smaller than a grizzly bear who have every intention of knocking them down.

Eben Britton was an offensive lineman with the New York Giants. He played three NFL games high. “Cannabis cements your surroundings,” he told the NY Post. “A lot of people say they’re useless when they smoke weed. But my performances were solid and I felt good after.”

Dawson has worked with Olympic marathon runners and has now started a company called Mind2Achieve with Dave Scott-Thomas, arguably one of the most successful distance coaches in our sport. Dawson is not a cannabis consumer, but knows the world is changing. Her own mother recently booked a consultation with her doctor to discuss CBD. In Dawson’s estimation, nerves—a term she prefers to ‘anxiety,’ which conjures fear—can be debilitating and if cannabis can help someone reach the start line, that’s good.

She knows demand is increasing for CBD and cannabis products to help athletes. She’s just looking for a little more scientific evidence before recommending that someone smoke a joint before playing in the Super Bowl. “Now that we’ve legalized cannabis, I’m getting questions about what it means to the athletic community and I think it could be a good thing,” Dawson says. “In general, with the people I see, I say, whatever works. If cannabis makes you more effective, go for it.”