Remember "Medical" Marijuana?

You may recall that the approval by voters of "medical" marijuana led quickly to a de facto legalization of recreational marijuana. The original selling point was that a few cancer patients and others could benefit from doctor-prescribed marijuana, so why shouldn't it be allowed? But once it was allowed, it wasn't hard to obtain a prescription for any ailment, real, imagined, or totally made up. 

What the US Supreme Court opened the door to NIL (name-image-likeness) payments to college athletes, the justices probably imagined that only a few star athletes would benefit. But once NIL was allowed, supposedly for stars, it became a general recruitment and retention tool, i.e., general pay-for-play. Now lower courts are recognizing - and apparently endorsing - general pay-for-play. From Inside Higher Ed:

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction siding with the states of Tennessee and Virginia in their lawsuit challenging the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s enforcement of its rules restricting the use of name, image and likeness payments to recruit athletes... Judge Clifton L. Corker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee issued a preliminary injunction barring the NCAA from enforcing its name, image and likeness policy, citing not its impact on institutions like the University of Tennessee but on athletes themselves.

“It is pure speculation to assume that student-athletes would receive more lucrative NIL deals in an open market. Fair-market value may be equal to or less than the NIL deals student-athletes can currently receive after selecting a school,” Corker wrote. “But without the give and take of a free market, student-athletes simply have no knowledge of their true NIL value. It is this suppression of negotiating leverage and the consequential lack of knowledge that harms student-athletes.”

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/02/26/judge-bars-ncaa-enforcing-its-rules-name-likeness.