There are things in this life that make no sense.
(For instance, when my DVD player is off, why does it have a glowing light at all times? In case I forget it's there? For navigation?)
If you listen to a lot of people (among them a sizeable percentage of college students,
Peter Tosh, and the people from NORML) among the things that make the least sense are the drug laws, specifically those concerning marijuana.
A lot of drug law dissension has its logic. How is it, again, that known killers like cigarettes and whiskey are legal while marijuana isn't? And why would we want to raise the value of drugs -- and deliver bigger profits to their crooked purveyors -- by pushing them underground? And if people are going to use drugs no matter what, shouldn't we collect taxes on them?
And on and on and on. The arguments have been going on for decades.
But typically, in my experience, as the conversation unfolds, at some point pot's most ardent advocates tend to throw in something else. Amid all the stuff most people could nod along with, you end up hearing something like "and it makes me drive better!"
And then you think to yourself, hmm ... this person just might have a screw loose.
I hereby introduce the words of Indiana Pacers' David Harrison, recently suspended five games for violating the league's anti-drug policy. He talked to Indiana's 1070 AM, and I'll tell you what, I encourage you to listen to the whole thing.
He comes off like a very real and nice young man, to be honest, albeit perhaps one who is not in step with his employer on a key issue. A segment, as transcribed on the blog Indy Cornrows:
I made a mistake and if that mistake costs me my career, then that's where we need to look. Look at what I did and look at what I lost. You know what I'm saying. Does marijuana ... is it that bad? That's the question I really want people to ask themselves sometimes.
Following rules blindly, doesn't mean you're right just by following those rules. There needs to be a just rule. I mean, a long time ago George Washington sat around, didn't want to pay taxes to the crown. There's other things going on, but the rudimentary part of our American revolution was we didn't want to pay taxes. And we broke that rule and we have America today. You know, if we would've lost that war, George Washington would be Benedict Arnold.
You know, it's whoever wins, you get the praise. Nicotine won, the tobacco industry won. That's the thing, they wouldn't want marijuana to be legal.
Meanwhile, in the big picture, his argument has a certain thread of sense, even if you ignore the fact that he's peddling a line of reasoning unlikely to play in a market that would give its eye teeth to be controversy-free. But OK, you have to give the guy something for standing up for what he believes in, being real, and giving some lip service to history. But he keeps talking:
It causes less cancer and actually, I've read studies where in cities with very bad air polution like in Indiana, it helps protect you from lung cancer.
Listen, I don't know these studies. Maybe he's right. But I do know that 99% of listeners just stopped believing him, and that's not going to help him keep his job.
And here's where the story gets less funny. David Harrison -- nice young man -- really might be out of the league before too long. It could happen. That's the kind of thing he's wrestling with right now. I feel for anyone whose job is on the line.
In the end, I think it comes down to: playing in the NBA is a fantastic privelege. It really is. You get to play the sport you love, in front of adoring fans, while -- if you play your cards right -- charting a financial future that will let you do whatever you want after you retire with lots more living to do.
There are requirements for this job. And fair or not, one of them is passing regular drug tests. Which means at some point you have to ask yourself: how great is smoking marijuana, and is it better than one of the greatest jobs in the world?
UPDATE: Wow! Great email from a TrueHoop reader who points us to the study about marijuana possibly reducing lung cancer rates. Marc Kaufman of the Washington Post writes:
The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.
The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.
"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."
Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.
Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.
Every blog in America, including this one, made fun of David Harrison for that line, and now we learn it's not funny at all? I feel like David Harrison owes us some new funny angle to this story, since we just got robbed of our old one.
The same TrueHoop reader also says:
You're right, of course. Playing in the NBA must be way better than smoking marijuana. I'd trade in a heartbeat, if I could. But if everybody thinks that way, no one will ever speak out against the injustice of our drug laws. It's not just about hassling recreational potsmokers like myself and David Harrison. People still go to prison for marijuana-related crimes. Here in California, people who run medical marijuana dispensaries that are legal under state law can have their business seized, their livelihood destroyed and their freedom taken away whenever the DEA feels like it. Sure, there are a lot of people who would be more credible than David Harrison who might speak out against this, but that's an argument that those people should speak out, not that David Harrison shouldn't.
And I hear this point, too. But I guess I don't see why David Harrison can't speak out against injustice while not smoking pot. And where was this righteousness when Harrison was not facing punishment for three straight failed drug tests? I guess my thing is that there is free will here -- he can work for whoever will offer him a job, but he accepted the job with the contract that stipulates these drug tests. He can say what he wants about the rules -- if he wants to write an essay about the drug laws, I'll certainly consider publishing it right here. But until those rules are changed, if I were him, I'd make it my mission to figure out how to have as much fun as possible while sober.
(Photo by Layne Murdoch/Getty Images)
