The National Football League (cue booing) and the National Football League Players Association (cue snoring) may work together to find common ground on marijuana as a pain relief technique.
But were I you, I wouldn’t wager as much as one well-rolled blunt on a beneficial outcome.
According to the Washington Post, the league has sent a letter to the union offering to work together on an agreement that could open the way to allowing medical pot as a way to help cope with the brutal physical toll of football.
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Three things, though, come immediately to mind here.
One, the league is after something, and it usually isn’t to the benefit of the players.
Two, the league has pulled out of studies on CTE it promised to fund, and haggles endlessly on payments to former players with brain issues in hopes that maybe the problem, the players and their brains will all go away.
And three, the league never misses a chance to fight with the union and then blame the union on any issue, because that’s how the 32 owners get their competitive rocks off.
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If this seems like a one-sided analysis, it’s because it is. Then again, it is also an analysis based on mountains and molehills of historical evidence, and there is no contravening evidence that the league has ever done anything jointly with the union that didn’t come at a cost to the players.
Plus, like everything else, the devil is in the details, and studies aren’t progress. Only signed documents are progress, and all we have on this issue is announcements from the league and the union that they are both coming up with their own studies. Great. Hurray paperwork.
In the meantime, players get the same two kinds of treatment for chronic pain – pills, which are typically far worse and less efficacious, and threats to get out of the tub or get off the club.
Thus, I choose to be less than heartened by this development, until it actually is a development and not just more piehole-flapping on a subject that has already has far too much of it, and no action at all.