How many times would Gordon need to get high for it to equal the offense of Rice?
He could literally smoke a million joints and it would not be as "bad" as what Rice did. I agree that Gordon seems rather foolish for continuing to smoke when he knew he would be frequently tested and that a positive test would result in a lengthy suspension. If I was his advisor I would just tell him he can smoke all he wants when he's 30 and no longer has an NFL career, and its foolish to risk millions to get high.
My point was that the NFL shouldn't really care who smokes or drinks. I just don't see why it matters ... if you get arrested for drunk driving, or for the sale/purchase of any legit drug, then sure, a serious multi-game suspension. There's literally no reason that Gordon shouldn't be allowed to smoke weed and catch TDs and drive NFL ratings. Why does the NFL drug test (PEDs aside)? What benefit does it provide them to suspend players like Gordon and Blackmon? Keeps the image clean? Please. It hurts the league.
What Gordon did was foolish but it wasn't immoral. What Rice did was terrible. But the NFL has rigid rules on "drugs" (and by that I mean a plant that is decriminalized in approx. 33% of the states in our union) and tends to let the legal process dictate actual, serious offenses.
I'm not defending Gordon's actions, I'm criticizing the NFL's policies.
While I'm at it, I'd like to point out that Donte Stallworth got the same suspension (1 year) for killing someone with his car while driving legally drunk... as Gordon gets for smoking weed. Gordon did do it more than once, though... and Stallworth only killed 1 guy, so there's that. And Rice only uppercut his wife once, too.
Yeah, NFL's priorities are insane. Von Miller could get suspended for an entire season tomorrow for doing something that is perfectly legal in his own state. That's idiotic, and if there's a clearer example of the league's misplaced priorities, I would love to see it.
Of course, the NFL doesn't operate in a vacuum. It operates inside the context of a broader society, and that society's priorities have proven to be every bit as misplaced. No nation in all of recorded history has incarcerated a larger percentage of its population, and the majority of the blame for that falls on the back of the failed "War on Drugs". It's all fine for us enlightened individuals on a fantasy football message board to be saying "who cares if he smokes a joint, it's not like it's a performance enhancer" (and, in fact, I've said in the past that I think the outrage over performance enhancers is also overdone). But in a world where a president who admits to smoking pot in his youth, and who has stated that he doesn't think pot is any more dangerous than alcohol, can still prosecute roughly double the number of marijuana cases as his predecessor... let's just say that I'm not expecting sanity to suddenly prevail in the NFL's policy any time soon. Ten years from now, I think there's a real chance the league might be coming around on this issue, but ten years from now will be ten years too late for Josh Gordon.
In other words, it's crappy that an as-far-as-I-can-tell standup guy like Josh Gordon is considered a character risk and some real shining gems of inhumanity are not, but in today's NFL, Josh Gordon is a massive risk.