Maybe the world should ease up a little on professional athletes who occasionally indulge themselves in non-performance enhancing drugs. According to new research, and anyone without a complete lack of commonsense, alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than cannibis and ecstasy.
Using a "matrix of harm" to classify 20 different drugs:
Professor Colin Blakemore added: “Drug policy is primarily aimed at reducing the harm to individual users, their families and society. But at present there is no rational, evidence-based method for assessing the harm of drugs. We have tried to develop such a method. We hope that policy makers will take note of the fact that the resulting ranking of drugs differs substantially from their classification in the Misuse of Drugs Act and that alcohol and tobacco are judged more harmful than many illegal substances.”
Or, as the great Jeff Spicoli once said:
All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine.
Seriously, has anyone considered why an athlete might choose to smoke weed, beyond the juvenile explanations you would hear from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency? Does competitive stress have something to do with it? You can't tell me it's not a factor.
Now, getting caught driving around with 213 pounds of marijuana in your van is one thing (see Nate Newton), but otherwise athletes are fairly discreet about their personal drug habits. That's why the press shits egg rolls whenever a player is publicly linked to drug possession, even if it was an empty container, as in Michael Vick's airport questioning.
No one, athletes included, is going to stop smoking weed. The hundreds of millions of dollars in annual drug busts shows how much demand there is in the U.S. alone. The seizure amounts get larger every year, so it can't just be the entire Portland Trailblazers team roster who is out there purchasing it.
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