Jerry Jones Talks Like the NFL is Going to OK Cannabis Use

Source - The MLB no longer tests for marijuana, and the NFL may be following suit, eventually.

“I think that you should expect and will expect an adjustment” of the league’s prohibition on marijuana use, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Friday on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas, via Michael Gehlken of the Dallas Morning News.

Jones added that the ban on marijuana use could be lifted as part of the next Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Jones has long been arguing against the league’s stance on marijuana, which polices the private lives of players in furtherance of an outdated “war on drugs.” Adopted, as most disciplinary policies are, as a P.R. move by the league, there’s no longer a P.R. benefit to be derived from banning marijuana use.

Good for Jerry Jones, assuming he's successful in his efforts. The NFL's ban on cannabis has been probably the single most hypocritical policies they've had in their history. And it's only gotten more laughably stupid as states in which they have franchises have been legalizing it. When there's not a player in your game - from the interior linemen who knock heads 60+ times a game to the field goal kicker - who can get through a season without some kind of pain management, then forcing them to resort to prescription meds and wishing them good luck with the bad effects is borderline evil. 

And Jones is right. It is "War on Drugs" talk. The kind of rules they put in place when the league was run by guys with flat top hairdos and pack-a-day habits who wore suits to practices and drank Highballs at lunch. Men who, when they weren't dreaming about publicly financed stadiums and boning their secretaries, dreamed of lecturing some filthy hippy of the evils of smoking pot, Joe Friday style:

But it's just a dated, nonsensical model to have a full time Piss Patrol flying all over the country to keep tabs on whether any of 1,500 grown men are treating themselves with The Devil's Kale. I've heard stories about players going on cruise ships in the offseason for the sole purpose of being able to smoke without the testers calling you demanding to see your pee. And the only possible outcome of such tests is taking some of your best product off the field for a month at a time, if not longer. It's just bad business. And it should've been stopped years ago.

So hopefully, finally, cooler heads will prevail. And while Jerry Jones might be a lizardy creep and a raging egomaniac who can't figure out that he doesn't know how to build a winner after 25 years, he's doing the work of the angels on this one. I suppose he's the perfect guy for the task, too. When you won three Super Bowls in four years with a roster of guys ripping giant rails off blow off the asses of $2,000/night call girls every day, you have the moral authority to tell the league it's got to get with the times.