Josh Howard Admits Smoking Pot: White Community Outraged
Fresh off their Miguel Tejada shocker, ESPN has stumbled upon another scoop, after Dallas Mavericks forward Josh Howard admitted to off-season marijuana usage on “The Michael Irvin Show,” a radio program on Dallas’ ESPN affiliate.
Howard, 28, expanded upon earlier comments he had made to the Dallas Morning News.
“I think that everybody in the media world and the sports world knows that NBA players smoke marijuana,” Howard said. “I just let him know that most of the players in the league do use marijuana and I have and do partake in smoking weed in the off-season sometimes and that’s my personal choice and my personal opinion. But I don’t think that’s stopping me from doing my job.”
The NBA does have a testing and treatment program in place for marijuana, but it cannot suspend a player until his third positive test.
Howard pitched an 85mph hanging fastball, and ESPN had to run with it. But, the consistent hypocrisy regarding Black athletes and marijuana use–as seen in the Mario Manningham scandal–has been disgusting.
Why is there a persistent racial double standard for recreational drug usage? White marijuana users are free-spirited, harmless hippies (Bill Walton?). Black marijuana users are thugs and criminals. Black athletes, ungrateful and unfairly risen from their financial station, are particular targets of abuse.
Furthermore, the stigma sticks. Randy Moss tested positive for marijuana in college, and it has framed his frosty media relationship since. Brett Myers of the Philadelphia Phillies punched his wife in the face in public, but, two years later, he is the merry prankster engaging reporters in a ruse to convince a teammate he was traded to Japan.
Most NBA players use or have used marijuana at some point. The problem is not with the statement itself, but its lack of context. One could make the same statement with most staff writers at the New Yorker, with most Nobel Prize winning scientists, with most Presidential candidates, and (gasp!) with most ESPN employees.
If marijuana usage does not substantially hinder someone’s ability to run for public office or to write a Pulitzer prize-winning speech, why would it affect Josh Howard’s basketball playing ability? More importantly, why do we care?
