Williams (finally) out of drug purgatory
Posted: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 3:39 PM
The most senseless suspension in the history of sports is over. After missing 25 games for no good reason, Ricky Williams has been cleared to play football again.
I don’t know if, at age 30, he can still help Miami, which needs all the help it can get. I hope he can, and I hope he can help himself. He’s been thoroughly abused by fans and media, but, while he may have made a few decisions most of us wouldn’t make, he’s never hurt anyone, never got into a bar fight, never been charged with assaulting a woman, never tried to get an unfair advantage on the field. He’s a very shy guy who has trouble dealing with attention, but he’s not a bad person.
As you will remember, Williams was suspended for all of last season after testing positive for a banned stimulant in a supplement he took after previous suspensions for testing positive for marijuana. He then missed more than half of this season for testing positive for marijuana again last winter.
He broke the rules and he did the time, but the only drug that anyone should have cared about was the stimulant, for which he should have gotten a warning as a first offense. But the NFL treated smoking pot, which has no effect on performance, the same as taking steroids and worse than getting a DWI, for which he wouldn’t have suffered any penalty at all.
I’m not going to hold a benefit for Williams. He knew the rules and he broke them. Just the same, the NFL has now taken two years from this guy’s career for using something that gives him no advantage.
In other words, Williams has done more time in the NFL brig than Pacman Jones will do for copping a plea in a triple shooting in Las Vegas that left a night club bouncer paralyzed. Jones isn’t accused of doing any shooting himself, but which one of these guys has done more damage to society, Williams, who likes to smoke pot, or Jones, who likes to hang out in strip clubs with a posse that carries guns -- and uses them? By the NFL’s standards, Jones is the good guy and Williams the spawn of Satan.
Readers who have never made an effort to collect a fact or two about drugs of all sorts and their effects on people and society will argue that Williams broke the law and deserves what he got. But he wasn’t charged with any crime because he’s never been nabbed by the police for using marijuana. He was nabbed by the drug testers. Besides, in the NFL, committing a crime isn’t grounds for automatic suspension. You can get suspended for taking legal supplements containing stimulants banned by the league. You can get suspended for taking legally prescribed drugs. But you don’t get an automatic suspension for tax fraud or domestic violence or getting drunk, taking off your clothes, and driving around town. (Joe Cullen, the Lions’ assistant who did that was suspended one game by his team, not by the league.)
So stop talking about what’s legal and what’s not. The league doesn’t care, so why should you?
What the league cares about is image, and the one it is going for is that of the most patriotic league in America. So if the government views dope smokers as an enormous threat to the republic, the NFL will, too, and damn the facts.
NORML, which has been working for decades to reform the country’s absurd marijuana laws, gathered a few statistics about marijuana arrests: “In 2006, state and local law enforcement arrested 829,625 people for marijuana violations. Annual marijuana arrests have nearly tripled since the early 1990s, and is the highest number ever recorded by the FBI.”
Nearly everything the government has told you about the dangers of marijuana is wrong, as the Drug Policy Alliance points out. The stuff doesn’t even increase a user’s chances of getting lung cancer.
Nor is it addictive. Nicotine -– a legal drug that the government taxes with great enthusiasm -– is up there with meth and crack in addictiveness. Alcohol is a notch back with heroin. Marijuana is at the bottom of the list, below caffeine and Ritalin. But you can go to jail for pot and for Ritalin you go to school.
To get back to Ricky, somebody ought to ask what he really missed two years for. Anyone who bothers to base policy on facts rather than propaganda would have no choice but to conclude that he didn’t lose those years; they were stolen from him.
