Bryce Miller: NFL’s marijuana policies should go up in smoke

It’s time for the NFL to stop penalizing marijuana use by its players as states, including the country’s most populous, California, continue to open doors to recreational and medical use.

The simple reason: There are more important things to worry about.

Worry about violent crimes, including the league’s struggles to police domestic violence among its own players. Lose front-office sleep over drugs that enhance performance and create truly unfair competitive advantages.

Hand-wring all you want and need, NFL. Just stop with marijuana. It’s grown into the league’s No. 1 non-issue, as proved by leaps and bounds in ballot booths from Bakersfield to Boston.

And deep down the NFL, as brand and image conscious as any professional sport, knows it.

California’s recent passage of Proposition 64 allowed conditional recreational use by citizens 21 and older. Three other states – Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada – did the same thing. It’s already legal for recreational use in Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Alaska.

Nearly a quarter of the NFL’s teams now play in states where recreational use is legal. More than half of the states in the U.S. now allow medical use. The stigma and arguments for the continued policy vanish with each puff-puff-passing day.

And that doesn’t even address the potential saner, safer, natural pain-management benefits for players battered by America’s most violent pastime.

Pittsburgh Steelers guard Ramon Foster, the team’s union representative, argued to USA Today that allowing marijuana use to combat pain could steer players away from addictive opioids.

“Would you rather have somebody that smokes occasionally or someone that, when you take that away from him, you have the guy that’s downing a fifth of Hennessy every night, or Tito’s Vodka. Is that what you want?” said Foster, according to USA Today.

“Would you rather have somebody that smokes marijuana at home, don’t go anywhere, or would you rather have the guy at the bar taking shots after shots? Why?”

He’s right.

Alcohol, though more socially accepted, has the potential to create and cultivate more damaging short- and long-term problems.

Yes, the NFL has the right and, we’d all likely argue, the responsibility to insist on “higher standards” in its workplace. Does the country agree, though, that it’s truly a higher standard – and one worth fighting to defend?Some will argue that players allowed to use weed will do so for reasons beyond managing pain. So what? How does that affect you, me or the game? Save the time and effort for things that really impact the sport in negative or unfair ways.

It’s time to let the opposition go. The tired thinking fails to address far too many modern realities, inside of league locker rooms and out.

Move on, NFL.