[as he receives a numbing injection in his knee] “Better football through chemistry.”
– Nick Nolte, North Dallas Forty, 1979.
“Federal drug agents launch surprise inspections of NFL teams following games,”
– Washington Post, November 16, 2014.
It is real funny, and not. The NFL has a serious drug problem, and it has been produced, directed, and acted out by the exclusive club of NFL owners for decades. A series of late 1980s drug scandals highlighted the dangers of players’ involvement with drugs in all four major North American sports. The irony is that the most damaging scandal has been promoted, if not publicized, by the king of all sports – the NFL. What happens when players become addicted to drugs handed out by ownership?
The NFL has made headlines with primetime embarrassments like Brett Favre’s addiction to Vicodin, and a class-action lawsuit by former players alleging widespread and illegal distribution of pain killing drugs. “Bountygate” seriously damaged Sean Payton’s credibility, but there was a much more serious accusation that he had tapped the Saints’ medicine cabinet for his own purposes. John Madden alleged that even an announcer had illegal access to pain killers.
In an article by Men’s Journal in 2012 Adolpho Birch, an NFL vice president who handles substance-abuse policy denied that such things happen, then or now. “Every pill is accounted for, to the dose, and noted in players’ records,” he said. “We have an intricate system to regulate inventories and auditing conducted by outside experts that cross-reference against prescriptions written.”
Sure they do.
High Times: The NFL Drugs Policy
If the NFL hands out the candy dish to everyone in the league how can they suspend players for smoking weed? The Atlantic.com sums up the hypocrisy: “The NFL’s War on Weed—a struggle that famously cost former All-Pro running back Ricky Williams a season-long suspension and caused top talents like Randy Moss and Tyrann Mathieu to slip in the league’s annual player draft—is increasingly out of step with both medical science and the culture at large.“
So here we are in 2014 and Tony Romo is coming off back surgery. After taking a hit to that same back Dr. Jerry Jones charged the sidelines and assured Coach Jason Garrett that Romo was pain free.
“It’s a medical decision,” Garrett said. “The people we talk to more than anybody else are the doctors. (Team physician) Dan Cooper comes over to me and says he’s cleared to play. We got the X-ray, it’s negative. We talked to Tony. He’s functional, he’s moving around. He can go in the game. So that’s how we made the decision.
“We try to take the emotion out of it. The fact that the player is jumping up and down saying, ‘I want to go back in the game,’ is a factor. His history and his credibility is a factor, but it’s a medical decision and we make it very unemotionally.”
Sure it’s a medical decision made by “team” doctors, but the emotion is gone once the shot hits the bloodstream. Pain killing drugs have the same effect long after players stop playing. Plenty of people are functional even after popping a few a pain killers or a 3-martini lunch. Why does a 4:20 break seem so criminal?
Every sport deals with its netherworld of elicit exchanges between team doctors and trainers. Baseball is most famous for its dealings with mysterious alchemists. (See the Victor Conte, Angel Presinal, or the Anthony Galea stories.) Can anyone really question the existence of prescription drugs in all four major sports? Prescriptions come in the form of pain killers and PEDs.
We all watch gruesome injuries every Sunday afternoon (and Thursday, Sunday, and Monday nights). We all wonder how these incredible athletes keep coming back for more. How many times have we watched a seriously injured player disappear into the locker room only to reappear as magically cured?
Maybe Colts owner Jim Irsay knows. Back in March he was arrested for a DWI and four felony counts of illegal possession of prescription drugs. He was suspended for six games and fined $500,000. That’s a pittance of his net worth. Maybe sports, like the cliché states, are a reflection of society. A Human Rights Watch report in 2009 stated that:
“When asked to close their eyes and envision a drug offender, Americans did not picture a white middle class man snorting powder cocaine or college students smoking marijuana. They pictured unkempt African-American men and women slouched in alleyways or young blacks hanging around urban street corners. At least for the last twenty years, however, whites have engaged in drug offenses at rates higher than blacks.”
Well now. These types of perceptions beg many questions about drug use in America. Many of us sports fans can remember slouching in lousy furniture in the dark recesses of a dorm room smoking a bong. And a lot us can remember snorting a few lines off our paychecks to pump the excitement of a football game or two. Why are NFL owners so exempt from the same arbitrary punishments that society imposes on middle and lower class drug “offenders?” What really separates us all – players, owners, and fans – from the same elusive answer to all our “pain?” Too many times it is drugs; and too many times the real dealers are criminals wearing white jackets.
The NFL grosses tens of billions of dollars per year. They represent corporate America. If they want to fly military jets over their stadiums, fleece cancer survivors, and promote their unique brand of barbarity then they should be held accountable to 21st century standards. It is time for the NFL, and the rest of America, to change the way drug policy is adjudicated.
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