NFL’s Colts to cut Ed Johnson after pot arrest
Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 11:11 am | By: Radical Russ
Colts to cut Ed Johnson after arrest | IndyStar.com | The Indianapolis Star
Ed Johnson’s latest off-the-field problem is one the Indianapolis Colts won’t tolerate. The team said it would waive its starting defensive tackle today as a result of his arrest early Wednesday morning in Hamilton County on a charge of possession of marijuana.The Colts promised swift disciplinary action once they had completed their fact-finding mission, and delivered. They are jettisoning a player who had started 18 games, including one in the postseason, after being signed as an undrafted rookie in May 2007.
Johnson’s latest troubles began at 12:08 Wednesday morning. A Hamilton County police officer stopped Johnson’s 2009 Mercedes on westbound I-465 for going 72 mph in a 55-mph zone.
When he opened his car door to talk with the officer, “the officer noticed the odor of marijuana coming from inside the vehicle,” said Vicky Dunbar, a public information officer with the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department.A subsequent search of Johnson’s car, first by a K-9 unit, revealed an undisclosed amount of marijuana in the vehicle’s center console.
Johnson, 24, was given a citation for speeding and arrested on a charge of marijuana possession, a Class A misdemeanor. He was transported to the Hamilton County Jail where he posted bond and was released.
So the Colts suspend a star DE for cannabis use. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the team will be pumped full of opioid pharmaceuticals to dull pain in order for them to play the game. Pull a Brett Favre and you can cry “painkiller addiction” and be completely forgiven, but pull a Ricky Williams and use marijuana medicinally and you can kiss your NFL career goodbye.
All this to send a moralistic message to the kiddies: Don’t smoke pot! Now, please kids, enjoy this Budweiser commercial with the scantily-clad girls who swoon over beer drinkers! Now here’s one for Cialis, so you can be pharmaceutically ready for that “right moment”. And another one for the latest mood stabilizer like Prozac! So sad, really, that the marijuana works better and is safer than the beer, Cialis, and Prozac at accomplishing the same results.
Before you respond with “But pot’s illegal”, let me just say that it is only illegal because of this sick moralizing about it. It’s far less harmful than the booze and pills whose ad revenue the NFL laps up. No wonder when NBA and NFL (and Sumo!) stars choose to relax with an intoxicant, they pick the safest one that doesn’t affect their playing ability in the slightest.
This player’s biggest mistake was choosing the drug that shows up for the longest time in a drug screen. Had he used coke, meth, heroin, LSD, mushrooms, Ecstasy, GHB, or sniffed some glue, those drugs would flush out of his system in plenty of time to pass the league’s drug screening process. How idiotic is it that we incentivize the use of drugs harder than marijuana?
Before you respond with, “he’s a role model, he shouldn’t do any drugs,” let me first ask you if you’re reading this after smoking a cigarette or having a beer, and ask why you’re so quick to throw stones from your glass house?
