[quote]pittbulll wrote:
You didn?t answer the question.If it were possible should we make alcohol illegal?[/quote]
If pigs could fly, would they still taste like ham? Hypothetical questions are stupid and a waste of time.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
If I do, then there goes half of your argument. You are making this much noise for a non-addictive plant that has the potential to decrease violence (completely the opposite of alcohol), increase appetite, and decrease nausea. It is a natural antiemitic. It can decrease intraocular pressure associated with glaucoma, and instead of constricting the lungs when smoked like cigarettes do, it actually has a dialatory effect.
[/quote]
It also has the potential for causing auto accidents, work related accidents, work absenteeism, increased workers comp. usage, and lung cancer. Wow, where do I sign up?
By the way, your glaucoma claim is full of shit. http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9811/13/marijuana.glaucoma/
[quote]reddog6376 wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
You didn?t answer the question.If it were possible should we make alcohol illegal?
If pigs could fly, would they still taste like ham? Hypothetical questions are stupid and a waste of time.
[/quote]
I am simply asking for your personal point of view. You seem some what defensive.
[quote]reddog6376 wrote
I figured that’s how you’d react. Is the butcher knowlegable about meat? Is the baker knowlegable about bread. Is somebody who spent their career dealing with drug addicts & thier associated crime knowlegable about drug abuse?
[/quote]
What I am trying to say was that someone who has invested his life in drug enforcement was a believer to begin with AND that there are a lot of people who made a career out of this. The drug enforcement in the US is an industry now that employs tens of thousands of people and they all want to keep their jobs, careers and so on.
If you establish a organization like the spanish inquisition it will develop something like a social inertia and you won?t run out of witches for the next few centuries.
You really don?t think that the fact that so many people benefit from this whole witch hunt makes it unlikely you are going to hear the truth from them?
So, if we legalize it now there may be a slight rise in unemployment after 20-30 years? Let?s risk that!
[quote]
Drug use is not just about your body, and what you put into it. Read above reply, I’m getting tired of repeating myself. [/quote]
But it doesn?t affect my body more than alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, lack of exercise, extreme sports and so on. If they can be irresponsible, I can be too. Which is completely irrelevant because I am smoking weed anyway, because as I said what I do with my body is not up for discussion.
[quote]orion wrote:
What I am trying to say was that someone who has invested his life in drug enforcement was a believer to begin with AND that there are a lot of people who made a career out of this. The drug enforcement in the US is an industry now that employs tens of thousands of people and they all want to keep their jobs, careers and so on.
If you establish a organization like the spanish inquisition it will develop something like a social inertia and you won?t run out of witches for the next few centuries.
You really don?t think that the fact that so many people benefit from this whole witch hunt makes it unlikely you are going to hear the truth from them?
[/quote]
Huh?
Your analogy makes no sense whatsoever.
Let’s not.
[quote]
Drug use is not just about your body, and what you put into it. Read above reply, I’m getting tired of repeating myself.
But it doesn?t affect my body more than alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, lack of exercise, extreme sports and so on. If they can be irresponsible, I can be too. Which is completely irrelevant because I am smoking weed anyway, because as I said what I do with my body is not up for discussion. [/quote]
I guess that explains why you can’t type a coherent sentence.
[crying hysterically] Oh wont someone PLEASE think about the CHILDREN!!![/crying hysterically]
It takes a village, and a multibillion dollar government industry and “war on drugs”, to raise a child.
[quote]pittbulll wrote:
reddog6376 wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
You didn?t answer the question.If it were possible should we make alcohol illegal?
If pigs could fly, would they still taste like ham? Hypothetical questions are stupid and a waste of time.
I am simply asking for your personal point of view. You seem some what defensive.
[/quote]
Only because I hate repeating myself. I did answer the question somewhere around page 6. READ THE POST.
[quote]reddog6376 wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
reddog6376 wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
You didn?t answer the question.If it were possible should we make alcohol illegal?
If pigs could fly, would they still taste like ham? Hypothetical questions are stupid and a waste of time.
I am simply asking for your personal point of view. You seem some what defensive.
Only because I hate repeating myself. I did answer the question somewhere
around page 6. READ THE POST.[/quote]
What is it stupid? Or you answered the question? Humor me please if it were the latter.
[quote]pittbulll wrote:
reddog6376 wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
reddog6376 wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
You didn?t answer the question.If it were possible should we make alcohol illegal?
If pigs could fly, would they still taste like ham? Hypothetical questions are stupid and a waste of time.
I am simply asking for your personal point of view. You seem some what defensive.
Only because I hate repeating myself. I did answer the question somewhere
around page 6. READ THE POST.
What is it stupid? Or you answered the question? Humor me please if it were the latter.[/quote]
Shut up & read the fucking post.
[quote]reddog6376 wrote:
Huh?
Your analogy makes no sense whatsoever.
[/quote]
Actually it does to everyone else.
[quote]reddog6376 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
What the fuck are you talking about!? Between 1728 and 1858 (the time period opium was ILLEGAL) opium importation increased from 4,000 to 70,000 chests annually! The addiction rate went from from .25% to 25% in 6 years…please show me a link!
The only possible way we can track addiction rate of 18th and 19th century China is by tracking the quantity of opium comming into the country. Dont you think a 17 fold increase while opium is illegal is a collosol failure? Please provide a link showing that addiction rate was steady until opium was legalized. Because everything I have read states otherwise. For instance:
http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2005papers/HIER2072.pdf
You want me to do your research for you? I get paid by the hour. There a dozens of good books writen about the Opium Wars, why don’t you turn off your computer and go read a few.
I’ll go over it one more time, and try not to use any big words. Opium use increased roughly 17 fold over 130 years while opium was illegal (using your numbers). Opium was legalized in 1858 after the second Opium War. From 1900 to 1906 addiction rates went from 0.25% to 27% (here’s a link for those to lazy to do their own research: http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v13n6p11.htm ). That’s a 108 fold increase in six years.
Stay with me now, this is where it gets tricky. 17x increase over 130 years vs. a 108x increase over six years. See the contrast? I never stated that addiction rates were steady before opium was legalized, but most intellegent people would agree that they were a hell of a lot better off before they legalized it.[/quote]
Ok, asshole, knock of the condescending “Im smarter than you” bullshit. Here is how internet debates work: you make a specific claim (like addiction went from .25% to 27% in 6 years) and you cite a source when asked. Thats not doing the research for someone else thats backing up your assertions…dick.
Your source (peacemagazine.org) makes an assertion that isnt even supported by a direct reference. Your source doenst explain how it reaches its conclusion. Exactly how do they know how much opium was being consumed. Go read my source (Harvard Institute of Economic Research), notice those things called footnotes with references in the text so you know exactly where the information comes from? My source makes it clear that it basis its conclusions on varifiable data…the amount of opium being imported. Here is a direct quote from my source:
“The results therefor provide no evidence that legalization increased opium consumption.”
So what’s your point? If and when drugs pass state lines through commercial action, the federal govt can then step in and regulate it. You dont get to outlaw something in its entirety just because there is the chance it will be used/sold in an inappropriate way. Apply that same rule to guns, fireworks, medicinal drugs, or just about anything else for that matter. Until someone does something that is covered by the regulatory power given to Congress by the Constitution, it has no right to act. And growing your own weed and getting high in your basement isnt something Congress has the right to govern.
VERY interesting article from ESPN’s site today. In it Skip Bayless talks about pot vs alcohol and how he doesn’t mind if players toke up.
“There’s worse than marijuana”
by Skip Bayless
I’m one of those body-as-temple weirdos. Wouldn’t touch alcohol. Never so much as tried a cigarette.
Couldn’t even imagine holding a joint.
My lone addictions are work, running and weight lifting, pretty much in that order. I know, I’m sick.
Are you shocked that Randy Moss smokes pot? And, do you even care?
So I stunned myself the other day on ESPN2’s “Cold Pizza” when I was asked if it bothered me that professional athletes – notably Randy Moss – smoke marijuana away from the field.
Honestly ? no.
And the gut feeling here is that it doesn’t really bother NFL or NBA executives, either – as long as a player doesn’t admit to smoking dope in an interview with Bryant Gumbel to air Tuesday night on HBO’s “Real Sports.”
That, of course, is what Moss admitted, according to a partial transcript released by HBO. Moss, who has always fought an off-the-field inferiority complex, apparently tried to impress Gumbel by saying “? I’ve had my fun throughout my [seven NFL] years, you know, predominantly in the offseasons.”
Moss, according to the transcript, also makes it clear he doesn’t abuse marijuana and says he doesn’t want kids “taking a lesson from me as far as, ‘Well, Randy Moss used it, so I’m going to use it.’”
Somewhere, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue is clenching his teeth and perhaps preparing to announce the league now has just cause to move Moss into the up-to-10-tests-a-month phase of the league’s recreational drug-use program. Moss didn’t just blow his cover. He blew the league’s.
The NFL and NBA basically operate on the premise that what parents and kids don’t know about players won’t hurt them – or keep them from watching or buying tickets.
And millions of deficient parents continue to teach kids that pro athletes – who invariably make the worst role models – are the ultimate role models.
Which brings me to the image-twisted, parent-fueled hypocrisies that sometimes make me feel as if I’m on a bad heroin trip.
How can the NFL expect players to readily agree to let team doctors shoot them with painkillers so they can play with injuries no real-world doctor would clear – yet then be prohibited from smoking marijuana to anesthetize themselves after tough games?
And why wouldn’t the league sooner outlaw drinking alcohol than smoking marijuana?
The obvious answer, of course, is that marijuana is illegal. Yet how and why alcohol survived prohibition to become one of this country’s biggest problems makes me feel three sheets to wind.
I’ll leave the soap-box derbies about big business and corrupt government to analysts who transcend sports’ toy box.
But you also should know this about me: I grew up in a two-alcoholic household. My father drank himself to death at 49 – cirrhosis of the liver the official cause. My mother’s brother and father also were alcoholics. Her brother basically crawled into a bottle and died, and my grandmother used to hide my brother and me in her basement when my grandfather came home drunk.
A mean bull of a drunk, my granddad was.
So I’ve sat through lots of alcoholic counseling and observed lots of drunk people. And after checking out the effects of pot on friends, mostly in college, I reached a few conclusions.
Alcohol dramatically alters a person’s normal state, often bringing out his or her worst side, with little or no control over motor skills or better judgment. Marijuana mostly suspends a person’s normal state, allowing him or her to escape into an inner fantasy world moving in slow motion.
I fear people who are drunk, in bars and driving cars. I don’t fear people who are high on grass.
Alcohol is far more damaging and deadly than marijuana – unless, of course, you want to argue the long-term cancer-causing effects of smoking grass.
So if I owned the Oakland Raiders, I’d be far more concerned from a performance standpoint if Randy Moss were drinking instead of smoking himself into a stupor every night. In fact, if I owned a team, I’d want to contractually prohibit my players from going to nightclubs – especially strip clubs – just the way pro deals often prevent high-paid athletes from risking their bodies skydiving or snow skiing.
Call me a fuddy-duddy if you like, but tell me this isn’t true: Mix pro athletes with alcohol, other high-testosterone males, and females wearing very little – and bad things often happen.
The police blotter is littered with weekly proof.
If customers could only smoke dope in nightclubs, I seriously doubt as many pro jocks would be arrested for breaking some big mouth’s jaw or bouncer’s arm.
But please, this is no out-of-left-field campaign to legalize marijuana. I merely consider it by far the lesser of two evils. If I were king for a day, I’d make alcohol and marijuana illegal.
Just me, but I’ve always considered it cowardly to duck life by escaping into a bottle or joint.
I’d like to think I can handle problems or have fun without unleashing some alter ego who’s cool or funny only to me or by retreating into my own private amusement park. When I go to dinner with friends, I prefer they remain exactly the way they were when we were seated.
But you and I are – or were – talking about an NFL superstar who all but brags to Bryant Gumbel that he smokes a little weed now and then.
We’re talking about a national media reaction – or overreaction – that surely had players in all pro sports privately chuckling.
“MOSS ADMITS TO OCCASIONAL MARIJUANA USE!”
You imagined a subhead of: “Duh.”
That’s exactly the way Lomas Brown reacted to the news. Brown, a former offensive tackle who played 18 seasons and made seven Pro Bowls, did a “Cold Pizza” segment just ahead of mine. He said whoever says only about 20 percent of NFL players smoke marijuana must be smoking some himself.
Ricky Williams, probably the most well-known marijuana smoker in pro sports.
Brown said at least 50 percent smoke marijuana.
Estimates of NBA marijuana use have ranged anywhere from 50 to 80 percent (at its height six or eight years ago). The word from both leagues continues to be that if you fail a marijuana test, you are stupid or dependent.
A year ago, Ricky Williams said he purposely failed a couple of tests so he could free himself from the confines of pro football and smoke dope without having to worry about using masking agents to beat tests. Though most studies find marijuana to be no more addictive than, say, caffeine, in extreme cases it obviously can consume a person as any drug can. Perhaps Williams fell into that category.
So how can the NFL let Williams off with a mere four-game suspension after he made a mockery of its testing? Obviously, he was beating tests when he felt like it.
Then again, he wasn’t using harder drugs, as far as we know. So the NFL is basically saying, “It was just marijuana.”
And marijuana is not a performance-enhancing drug such as steroids or amphetamines.
(Then again, in 1999, the Chicago Bulls were leaning toward taking a player with the first pick in the draft until he readily admitted he smoked marijuana before every game, to help his “flow.” The Bulls went in another direction.)
Yet as dedicated as I might be about what I do and do not put in my body, I can’t work up much righteous indignation about Randy Moss smoking some dope. Is that any worse a confession than “Moss Admits to Having an Occasional Beer”?
OK, OK: Marijuana is illegal.
But Moss plays a violent game. Pro basketball, with 82 regular-season games, is extremely demanding physically. Baseball can be, too, though alcohol seems to be more of baseball’s drug of choice.
But does it outrage me that many players unwind with some marijuana? Honestly, no. In fact, if anyone outside a hospital deserves to use marijuana, it’s an NFL or NBA player.
So what do parents tell kids who idolize Randy or Ricky? Tell them what I just wrote – that those guys are extremely gifted entertainers whose bodies take terrible beatings. Tell them Randy and Ricky have occasionally used marijuana in somewhat the same way very sick people do – as medical marijuana.
Yet how can a parent tell a kid not to try grass if the kid watches that parent get drunk?
Of course, to many parents in their 40s and 50s, grass remains something only hippie freaks get hooked on. They believe getting Cheech-and-Chonged on grass means a kid will soon be hooked on heroin, which could be humiliating and expensive to the parent.
But is marijuana any worse than beer or wine or booze?
Only if Randy Moss admits on TV he occasionally smokes it.
[quote]reddog6376 wrote:
orion wrote:
What I am trying to say was that someone who has invested his life in drug enforcement was a believer to begin with AND that there are a lot of people who made a career out of this. The drug enforcement in the US is an industry now that employs tens of thousands of people and they all want to keep their jobs, careers and so on.
If you establish a organization like the spanish inquisition it will develop something like a social inertia and you won?t run out of witches for the next few centuries.
You really don?t think that the fact that so many people benefit from this whole witch hunt makes it unlikely you are going to hear the truth from them?
Huh?
Your analogy makes no sense whatsoever.
For the record unemployment in the Netherlands in 2001 was 3.5%, in 2004 it was 6.5%. ( http://www.cbs.nl/en/publications/press-releases/2005/pb05e095.pdf )
So, if we legalize it now there may be a slight rise in unemployment after 20-30 years? Let?s risk that!
Let’s not.
Drug use is not just about your body, and what you put into it. Read above reply, I’m getting tired of repeating myself.
But it doesn?t affect my body more than alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, lack of exercise, extreme sports and so on. If they can be irresponsible, I can be too. Which is completely irrelevant because I am smoking weed anyway, because as I said what I do with my body is not up for discussion.
I guess that explains why you can’t type a coherent sentence. [/quote]
Bite me red dog
[quote]reddog6376 wrote:
Professor X wrote:
If I do, then there goes half of your argument. You are making this much noise for a non-addictive plant that has the potential to decrease violence (completely the opposite of alcohol), increase appetite, and decrease nausea. It is a natural antiemitic. It can decrease intraocular pressure associated with glaucoma, and instead of constricting the lungs when smoked like cigarettes do, it actually has a dialatory effect.
It also has the potential for causing auto accidents, work related accidents, work absenteeism, increased workers comp. usage, and lung cancer. Wow, where do I sign up?
By the way, your glaucoma claim is full of shit. http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9811/13/marijuana.glaucoma/[/quote]
How is my claim full of shit? That article backs up exactly what I wrote, that it decreases intraocular pressure. Get a clue, dumbass.
[quote]LBRTRN wrote:
Ok, asshole, knock of the condescending “Im smarter than you” bullshit. Here is how internet debates work: you make a specific claim (like addiction went from .25% to 27% in 6 years) and you cite a source when asked. Thats not doing the research for someone else thats backing up your assertions…dick.
Your source (peacemagazine.org) makes an assertion that isnt even supported by a direct reference. Your source doenst explain how it reaches its conclusion. Exactly how do they know how much opium was being consumed. Go read my source (Harvard Institute of Economic Research), notice those things called footnotes with references in the text so you know exactly where the information comes from? My source makes it clear that it basis its conclusions on varifiable data…the amount of opium being imported. Here is a direct quote from my source:
“The results therefor provide no evidence that legalization increased opium consumption.”[/quote]
Fine, here’s another: Opium
"Reflecting and reinforcing these global changes, the legalization of opium in China quickly transformed the country into the world’s leading producer. After the Second Opium War ended in 1858, Chinese officials encouraged local production, and poppy cultivation spread beyond the southwest to nearly every province. As addiction rose throughout China, imports of Indian opium increased from 4,800 tons in 1859 to an historic high of 6,700 tons in 1879. Despite the growth of Indian imports after 1858, most of the higher demand was supplied by Chinese domestic production.
By the 1880s, China was in the midst of a major opium boom, particularly in the rugged southwestern provinces of Szechwan and Yunnan. Observers claimed that China’s leading opium producing province, Szechwan, was harvesting 10,000 tons of raw opium annually. In 1881, the British consul at Yichang estimated the total opium production in the southwest at 13,525 tons, a figure that at first seemed exaggerated. Twenty-five years later, however, the first official statistics showed that Szechwan and Yunnan were in fact producing 19,100 tons, equivalent to 54 percent of China’s total harvest.
Although estimates varied widely, by 1885 China was probably growing twice as much opium as it was importing. By 1906, China had 13.5 million addicts consuming some 39,000 tons of opium. With bountiful supplies and legal retail sales, China had 27 percent of its adult males addicted to opium–a level of mass addiction never equaled by any nation before or since…"
…“–Rising from low levels in the 1840s, China produced 35,000 tons of raw opium in 1906-07–equivalent to 85 percent of world opium supply.”
“The number of opium smokers in China increased from 3 million in the 1830s to 13.5 in 1906”
Look, use whatever numbers you like, the undisputable fact is that opium turned China into a shit hole for over a century. Whether or not you believe that legalization increased opium use, it sure as hell didn’t decrease it. And this you what you want for your country? [quote]
So what’s your point? If and when drugs pass state lines through commercial action, the federal govt can then step in and regulate it. You dont get to outlaw something in its entirety just because there is the chance it will be used/sold in an inappropriate way. Apply that same rule to guns, fireworks, medicinal drugs, or just about anything else for that matter. Until someone does something that is covered by the regulatory power given to Congress by the Constitution, it has no right to act. And growing your own weed and getting high in your basement isnt something Congress has the right to govern. [/quote]
What’s my point? That federal drug laws are constitutional. End of story.
[quote]pittbulll wrote:
Bite me red dog
[/quote]
Good to see you put some thought into the debate.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
reddog6376 wrote:
Professor X wrote:
If I do, then there goes half of your argument. You are making this much noise for a non-addictive plant that has the potential to decrease violence (completely the opposite of alcohol), increase appetite, and decrease nausea. It is a natural antiemitic. It can decrease intraocular pressure associated with glaucoma, and instead of constricting the lungs when smoked like cigarettes do, it actually has a dialatory effect.
It also has the potential for causing auto accidents, work related accidents, work absenteeism, increased workers comp. usage, and lung cancer. Wow, where do I sign up?
By the way, your glaucoma claim is full of shit. http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9811/13/marijuana.glaucoma/
How is my claim full of shit? That article backs up exactly what I wrote, that it decreases intraocular pressure. Get a clue, dumbass.[/quote]
Looks like reddog is a anti-pot zealot. Nothing worse than a reformed smoker.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
How is my claim full of shit? That article backs up exactly what I wrote, that it decreases intraocular pressure. Get a clue, dumbass.[/quote]
Let me quote: “A new study that says smoking marijuana is a hazy and impractical way to treat glaucoma is the latest twist to the medical marijuana debate.”
“But to be effective, Green said a patient would have to smoke an unrealistic amount of marijuana If you want to maintain a low interocular pressure with marijuana, then you have to smoke a joint every 1 to 2 hours which is 10 to 12 joints a day, which is 4,000 a year,” he said. “That’s by anybody’s definition – no matter how liberal you are – a considerable consumption”
“For those who smoke cigarettes, marijuana has 50 percent more tar and volatile cancer-inducing compounds,” Green said. “It causes emphysema, changes hormones, changes a whole bundle of things. It is quite a toxic chemical”"
Pehaps you should re-read it.
And you spelled my name wrong.
[quote]jsbrook wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
Gregus wrote:
The 10th amendment is an interesting issue. How is it that the Feds can bust and openly arrest the citizens of California for growing cannabis licensed by the state that they live in. There’s a serious disparity brewing there.
That’s exactly what Im trying to get Zeb to answer. It seems that some Conservatives are all for a strict reading of the Constitution…except when it stands in the way of their social agenda.
Very true. Conservatives are all for strict construction, states rights, and individual liberties. Unless the action in question is a ‘sin’. Then, forget about it.
[/quote]
That case was horrible, but if you’re going to live by the USSC and an expanded Commerce Clause Power for Congress, which a whole lot of people seem happy to do w/r/t things like the Civil Rights Act or Brown v. Board of Ed, then you’re going to die by it as well.
[NOTE: I am not arguing that the effect of Brown v. Board of Ed was bad, simply that it extended federal power and walked on traditional understandings of federalism. Similarly, many (though not all, IMHO) effects of the U.S. Civil Rights Act were good, but definitely not within the Commerce Clause Power as it was understood originally, or up until the New Deal and the cascade of federal power that began with Wickard v. Filburn.]
[quote]Sonny S wrote:
VERY interesting article from ESPN’s site today. In it Skip Bayless talks about pot vs alcohol and how he doesn’t mind if players toke up.
“There’s worse than marijuana”
by Skip Bayless
I’m one of those body-as-temple weirdos. Wouldn’t touch alcohol. Never so much as tried a cigarette.
Couldn’t even imagine holding a joint.
My lone addictions are work, running and weight lifting, pretty much in that order. I know, I’m sick.
Are you shocked that Randy Moss smokes pot? And, do you even care?
So I stunned myself the other day on ESPN2’s “Cold Pizza” when I was asked if it bothered me that professional athletes – notably Randy Moss – smoke marijuana away from the field.
Honestly ? no.
And the gut feeling here is that it doesn’t really bother NFL or NBA executives, either – as long as a player doesn’t admit to smoking dope in an interview with Bryant Gumbel to air Tuesday night on HBO’s “Real Sports.”
That, of course, is what Moss admitted, according to a partial transcript released by HBO. Moss, who has always fought an off-the-field inferiority complex, apparently tried to impress Gumbel by saying “? I’ve had my fun throughout my [seven NFL] years, you know, predominantly in the offseasons.”
Moss, according to the transcript, also makes it clear he doesn’t abuse marijuana and says he doesn’t want kids “taking a lesson from me as far as, ‘Well, Randy Moss used it, so I’m going to use it.’”
Somewhere, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue is clenching his teeth and perhaps preparing to announce the league now has just cause to move Moss into the up-to-10-tests-a-month phase of the league’s recreational drug-use program. Moss didn’t just blow his cover. He blew the league’s.
The NFL and NBA basically operate on the premise that what parents and kids don’t know about players won’t hurt them – or keep them from watching or buying tickets.
And millions of deficient parents continue to teach kids that pro athletes – who invariably make the worst role models – are the ultimate role models.
Which brings me to the image-twisted, parent-fueled hypocrisies that sometimes make me feel as if I’m on a bad heroin trip.
How can the NFL expect players to readily agree to let team doctors shoot them with painkillers so they can play with injuries no real-world doctor would clear – yet then be prohibited from smoking marijuana to anesthetize themselves after tough games?
And why wouldn’t the league sooner outlaw drinking alcohol than smoking marijuana?
The obvious answer, of course, is that marijuana is illegal. Yet how and why alcohol survived prohibition to become one of this country’s biggest problems makes me feel three sheets to wind.
I’ll leave the soap-box derbies about big business and corrupt government to analysts who transcend sports’ toy box.
But you also should know this about me: I grew up in a two-alcoholic household. My father drank himself to death at 49 – cirrhosis of the liver the official cause. My mother’s brother and father also were alcoholics. Her brother basically crawled into a bottle and died, and my grandmother used to hide my brother and me in her basement when my grandfather came home drunk.
A mean bull of a drunk, my granddad was.
So I’ve sat through lots of alcoholic counseling and observed lots of drunk people. And after checking out the effects of pot on friends, mostly in college, I reached a few conclusions.
Alcohol dramatically alters a person’s normal state, often bringing out his or her worst side, with little or no control over motor skills or better judgment. Marijuana mostly suspends a person’s normal state, allowing him or her to escape into an inner fantasy world moving in slow motion.
I fear people who are drunk, in bars and driving cars. I don’t fear people who are high on grass.
Alcohol is far more damaging and deadly than marijuana – unless, of course, you want to argue the long-term cancer-causing effects of smoking grass.
So if I owned the Oakland Raiders, I’d be far more concerned from a performance standpoint if Randy Moss were drinking instead of smoking himself into a stupor every night. In fact, if I owned a team, I’d want to contractually prohibit my players from going to nightclubs – especially strip clubs – just the way pro deals often prevent high-paid athletes from risking their bodies skydiving or snow skiing.
Call me a fuddy-duddy if you like, but tell me this isn’t true: Mix pro athletes with alcohol, other high-testosterone males, and females wearing very little – and bad things often happen.
The police blotter is littered with weekly proof.
If customers could only smoke dope in nightclubs, I seriously doubt as many pro jocks would be arrested for breaking some big mouth’s jaw or bouncer’s arm.
But please, this is no out-of-left-field campaign to legalize marijuana. I merely consider it by far the lesser of two evils. If I were king for a day, I’d make alcohol and marijuana illegal.
Just me, but I’ve always considered it cowardly to duck life by escaping into a bottle or joint.
I’d like to think I can handle problems or have fun without unleashing some alter ego who’s cool or funny only to me or by retreating into my own private amusement park. When I go to dinner with friends, I prefer they remain exactly the way they were when we were seated.
But you and I are – or were – talking about an NFL superstar who all but brags to Bryant Gumbel that he smokes a little weed now and then.
We’re talking about a national media reaction – or overreaction – that surely had players in all pro sports privately chuckling.
“MOSS ADMITS TO OCCASIONAL MARIJUANA USE!”
You imagined a subhead of: “Duh.”
That’s exactly the way Lomas Brown reacted to the news. Brown, a former offensive tackle who played 18 seasons and made seven Pro Bowls, did a “Cold Pizza” segment just ahead of mine. He said whoever says only about 20 percent of NFL players smoke marijuana must be smoking some himself.
Ricky Williams, probably the most well-known marijuana smoker in pro sports.
Brown said at least 50 percent smoke marijuana.
Estimates of NBA marijuana use have ranged anywhere from 50 to 80 percent (at its height six or eight years ago). The word from both leagues continues to be that if you fail a marijuana test, you are stupid or dependent.
A year ago, Ricky Williams said he purposely failed a couple of tests so he could free himself from the confines of pro football and smoke dope without having to worry about using masking agents to beat tests. Though most studies find marijuana to be no more addictive than, say, caffeine, in extreme cases it obviously can consume a person as any drug can. Perhaps Williams fell into that category.
So how can the NFL let Williams off with a mere four-game suspension after he made a mockery of its testing? Obviously, he was beating tests when he felt like it.
Then again, he wasn’t using harder drugs, as far as we know. So the NFL is basically saying, “It was just marijuana.”
And marijuana is not a performance-enhancing drug such as steroids or amphetamines.
(Then again, in 1999, the Chicago Bulls were leaning toward taking a player with the first pick in the draft until he readily admitted he smoked marijuana before every game, to help his “flow.” The Bulls went in another direction.)
Yet as dedicated as I might be about what I do and do not put in my body, I can’t work up much righteous indignation about Randy Moss smoking some dope. Is that any worse a confession than “Moss Admits to Having an Occasional Beer”?
OK, OK: Marijuana is illegal.
But Moss plays a violent game. Pro basketball, with 82 regular-season games, is extremely demanding physically. Baseball can be, too, though alcohol seems to be more of baseball’s drug of choice.
But does it outrage me that many players unwind with some marijuana? Honestly, no. In fact, if anyone outside a hospital deserves to use marijuana, it’s an NFL or NBA player.
So what do parents tell kids who idolize Randy or Ricky? Tell them what I just wrote – that those guys are extremely gifted entertainers whose bodies take terrible beatings. Tell them Randy and Ricky have occasionally used marijuana in somewhat the same way very sick people do – as medical marijuana.
Yet how can a parent tell a kid not to try grass if the kid watches that parent get drunk?
Of course, to many parents in their 40s and 50s, grass remains something only hippie freaks get hooked on. They believe getting Cheech-and-Chonged on grass means a kid will soon be hooked on heroin, which could be humiliating and expensive to the parent.
But is marijuana any worse than beer or wine or booze?
Only if Randy Moss admits on TV he occasionally smokes it.
[/quote]
So the reason we should legalize it is because there are worse things?