Reefer Gladness in the NFL

Great timing! The first weekend of NFL football regular season play – and it really is so darn playful the way those boys run around – begins today.

So we couldn’t be more delighted that the National Football League has asked us to help explain why their players – please don’t call them “warriors”; that would demean our heroic mercenaries in the armed forces – should be forbidden from enjoying marijuana. The league is refining its Drug Policy, and they supposedly want some “other points of view,” especially if discussing the NFL’s Drug Policy will distract attention from their brain injury scandal.

Apparently the assistant of someone’s assistant did a Web search and figured out we’d written a thoughtful book on all things weed-related. But apparently they didn’t actually read that book, because here we are, pleasantly buzzed, consulting for an organization, the NFL, that, like most American institutions, is reflexively anti-pot.

Well, so are we!

I mean, when it comes to football. We’re very anti-pot.

Teams have a vested interest in keeping their players on Human Growth Hormones and off marijuana. Unlike steroids, cannabis isn’t “performance-enhancing.” It can’t make a team’s employees run faster, jump higher, or wound more viciously. It’s of no practical use to winning games, which is probably all the reason you need.

But we’ll go you one better: Marijuana tends to make its users less aggressive, more compassionate, and barely motivated to get up from the couch to change the Miles Davis CD that’s been repeating for the last three hours, let alone attempt to inflict grievous bodily harm on the opposing quarterback.

Marijuana makes you play football with a tremendous lack of commitment to violence. It has no place whatsoever in our favorite televised sport.

Any team (or league) with a passion for winning, for achieving, should keep this pernicious substance far away from their players, just as handlers of fighting cocks shield their roosters from a big meal of corn-pellets-and-Tylenol-with-codeine until after the carnage.

You want to play the PGA Tour stoned? Good luck to you, sir.

You want to hit Major League Baseball pitching high on hash brownies? Time slows down, but the velocity of a 96-mph fastball doesn’t.

You want to compete in virtually any athletic competition? Beside shooting or archery, where the goal is basically to do nothing, marijuana isn’t going to help you to win anything but the title, “Biggest Bum.”

Well, guess what? The bums lost. That war is over. The bums lost. That’s why you don’t see no bums in the NFL.

For the sake of the game’s great traditions, particularly the tradition of causing injury to yourself and others (preferably others) the NFL is absolutely right to prohibit their soldiers – sorry, players – from going into battle – sorry, a game – from using cannabis. No one wants to watch a bunch of giant men hugging each other and giggling at private jokes. We want blood.

We want collisions and concussions and confrontations. We want yelling and arguing. We want a very big deal made out of very little. We want our guys to go off.

The NFL should encourage their players to stop smoking pot and start drinking. Heavily. Because being a nasty drunk never violated anyone’s Drug Policy.