Nalod wrote:ITs not weed, its the bad stuff......

Do you know for sure? And what's your definition of bad stuff? You can can OD on cough medicine....They call that LEAN.

F. Discipline
(1)Drugs of Abuse. If a player tests positive for a Drug of Abuse during Random Testing or Reasonable Cause Testing, he will be dismissed and disqualified from the NBA. <snip>

if he has no past violations (SPEDS, weed get you games), and has not been convicted of a drug charge, it must be a drug of abuse.

smackeddog wrote:

Allanfan20 wrote:Hope he can get his life together. Addiction is very powerful.

It is, and banning someone from doing their job for the arbitrary period of 2 years is a bizarre response- why not tie their return to adherence to a drug treatment plan? I think the nba should at least do some pondering over their response. priority should be the health and wellbeing of the player rather than punishing them.

without explicitly knowing I’m sure those things happen outside of the eyes of the rest of us. NBA is a business first and they gotta protect their product as a priority.

smackeddog wrote:

Allanfan20 wrote:Hope he can get his life together. Addiction is very powerful.

It is, and banning someone from doing their job for the arbitrary period of 2 years is a bizarre response- why not tie their return to adherence to a drug treatment plan? I think the nba should at least do some pondering over their response. priority should be the health and wellbeing of the player rather than punishing them.

Yeah the 2 year rule is odd. With that said, you can’t force someone to get help. Only the addict can submit to the 12 steps of recovery and that’s by choice.

If he can’t help himself, then he might as well never return. If he can help himself, then he can probably return far sooner than 2 years, so long as he is consistently being proactive about fighting his addiction.

I wish him the best.

TripleThreat wrote:

smackeddog wrote:I do think the nba's drug policy is a bit draconian and out of date- `i can understand suspending someone multiple years for steroids etc, but recreational drugs etc would tend to indicate a problem, and the emphasis should be on treatment not punishment.

I'll tell you what my agent told me before I was drafted and what I was told during my Combine and what I was told all throughout my entire career and even after -

"If you are a professional athlete and you fail a drug test, you've really failed an IQ test."

The NBA in particular. The NBA has the most powerful union/collective bargaining if any of the major sports. You could argue MLB is quite powerful on the player side, but even the NBA will trump it because of the talent shortage based on height/athleticism mix dependency.

If you are an NBA player, you know when all your tests are coming.

If you fail them, you are a ****ing idiot. Period. End of story.

Side note, professional sports, the major ones in the US operate without government oversight. Uncle Sam got involved in MLB and the juicing era, but that was a total ****ing mess. Also no one wants to go there. In exchange, the leagues informally understand that they are not to take the role of trying to suggest long term/broad sweeping social policy reserved for the role of the government and the systems in place to manage that.

I think people really not understand the raw marketing impact of Jeremy Lin and Linsanity. It was a role model/hero that a gaggle of soccer moms could get behind. Clean. Wholesome. Good story. Polite. Christian. Non threatening. Said the right things. Humble. Do you think the league and Stern didn't have nightmares about Kobe Bryant, who they tried to build their marketing around for a while? Rapist. Screamed out slurs against homosexuals and got suspended for it. Cussed at reporters and was basically a high maintenance ******* his entire career. Coach killer. Shitty with the press.

The "mainstream" fan ( not the hardcore ones like on this site) are worth more money to the leagues. They don't want to root for rapist, drug abusers and *******s. The purpose of sports is, in part, ESCAPISM. You want to avoid real life sometimes. You don't want reminders of the ****ed up **** you see everyday anyway.

Kobe Bryant was a gigantic piece of ****. You can see gigantic pieces of **** at your job. Maybe in your home. With your neighbors. At your gym. You can't market that to the masses who create the revenue you need to survive.

Tyreke Evans is an idiot. Fuck him. His dumb **** makes life harder for every other professional athlete out there. No one is going to war with the government and try to break long standing understand agreements with how things have always worked because his dumb ass couldn't put down a crack pipe long enough to pass a ****ing test he knew was coming half a year in advance.

The problem is Evans is low IQ on a life scale and dumbass. And you want to make him some kind of martyr or some ****. How about putting down the ****ing crack pipe? Why aren't you telling Evans to do that? Is this culture so ****ing entitled that it's everyone else's fault Evans can't put down a mother****ing crack pipe?

I work with people struggling with substance misuse- it's nothing to do with intelligence, plenty of high IQ people have developed substance dependancy- once your addicted, objected, rational thought goes out the window

smackeddog wrote:

TripleThreat wrote:

smackeddog wrote:I do think the nba's drug policy is a bit draconian and out of date- `i can understand suspending someone multiple years for steroids etc, but recreational drugs etc would tend to indicate a problem, and the emphasis should be on treatment not punishment.

I'll tell you what my agent told me before I was drafted and what I was told during my Combine and what I was told all throughout my entire career and even after -

"If you are a professional athlete and you fail a drug test, you've really failed an IQ test."

The NBA in particular. The NBA has the most powerful union/collective bargaining if any of the major sports. You could argue MLB is quite powerful on the player side, but even the NBA will trump it because of the talent shortage based on height/athleticism mix dependency.

If you are an NBA player, you know when all your tests are coming.

If you fail them, you are a ****ing idiot. Period. End of story.

Side note, professional sports, the major ones in the US operate without government oversight. Uncle Sam got involved in MLB and the juicing era, but that was a total ****ing mess. Also no one wants to go there. In exchange, the leagues informally understand that they are not to take the role of trying to suggest long term/broad sweeping social policy reserved for the role of the government and the systems in place to manage that.

I think people really not understand the raw marketing impact of Jeremy Lin and Linsanity. It was a role model/hero that a gaggle of soccer moms could get behind. Clean. Wholesome. Good story. Polite. Christian. Non threatening. Said the right things. Humble. Do you think the league and Stern didn't have nightmares about Kobe Bryant, who they tried to build their marketing around for a while? Rapist. Screamed out slurs against homosexuals and got suspended for it. Cussed at reporters and was basically a high maintenance ******* his entire career. Coach killer. Shitty with the press.

The "mainstream" fan ( not the hardcore ones like on this site) are worth more money to the leagues. They don't want to root for rapist, drug abusers and *******s. The purpose of sports is, in part, ESCAPISM. You want to avoid real life sometimes. You don't want reminders of the ****ed up **** you see everyday anyway.

Kobe Bryant was a gigantic piece of ****. You can see gigantic pieces of **** at your job. Maybe in your home. With your neighbors. At your gym. You can't market that to the masses who create the revenue you need to survive.

Tyreke Evans is an idiot. Fuck him. His dumb **** makes life harder for every other professional athlete out there. No one is going to war with the government and try to break long standing understand agreements with how things have always worked because his dumb ass couldn't put down a crack pipe long enough to pass a ****ing test he knew was coming half a year in advance.

The problem is Evans is low IQ on a life scale and dumbass. And you want to make him some kind of martyr or some ****. How about putting down the ****ing crack pipe? Why aren't you telling Evans to do that? Is this culture so ****ing entitled that it's everyone else's fault Evans can't put down a mother****ing crack pipe?

I work with people struggling with substance misuse- it's nothing to do with intelligence, plenty of high IQ people have developed substance dependancy- once your addicted, objected, rational thought goes out the window

Yup. It’s an emotional problem and it’s a tunnel-vision mindset. It’s sad and scary.

If you agree a woman has the right to her body who the hell are you to limit what someone does to their mind?