by Michael Konik
After a photo of Larry Tunsil wearing a gas-mask bong surfaced on the Interweb, the consensus #1 player in the 2016 NFL Draft suddenly became the 13th most appealing choice.
Now someone must explain to casual fans why NFL players — please don’t call them “warriors,” as that would demean our heroic mercenaries in the armed forces — why they 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.
Like most American institutions, the National Football League 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. They’re not about to 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 stoned? 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, only heroes.
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 — 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 discourage their players from smoking pot and encourage them to start drinking. Heavily.
Because being a nasty drunk never violated anyone’s Drug Policy.
Michael Konik is the best-selling author of many books, including Reefer Gladness: Stories, Essays and Riffs on Marijuana.