Jeffress Suspended for drug use - new info?

[mark brouhard is number on]

totally agree, but if he knew he was going to get tested for it, if that's indeed what it was, he probably should've known better. tough for a kid to do though, especially if all his boys are doing it with him.

[Brian the Automator]

DOC ELLIS!

Acid won't show up on a pee test

 

[splitterpfj]

Whether marijuana should be legalized is not the point in this discussion. It is not legal, players know they will be tested, this was a major lapse in judgement.

 

Yes, he's just a kid, and yes, kids do stupid things, which is part of how you learn, but this isn't a small deal, this young man has everything to lose with decisions like this. It's a tradeoff, here's a bunch of money and a chance at a great life, but now you aren't just one of the guys, and if you act like you are, you can lose the whole deal.

[homer]

To look at this another way, was it dumb of Krynzel to go moto cross riding (or whatever it was) even though he had a clause in his contract forbidding him from doing it?

[mothershipconnection]

I don't think it's that draconian for baseball to test for illegal substances.

 

Also, there's no way baseball can take the public stance that it has against drugs but then say pot is OK. They've put themselves in a position where many see them as engaging in a bunch of grandstanding, and they'd be ripped on and publicly scrutinized for allowing some drugs but not others.

[gregmag]

TC, you're doing this thing, and BJK did it earlier -- making the point that marijuana is illegal, which is true, and then kind of sliding into the notion that it's dangerous, which more often than not isn't true. There's a lot to sort out in this discussion, a lot of ways you can come at it, but one thing I know is that the law bears no necessary relationship to ground-level reality. The relationship between the two depends on the good judgment of lawmakers. IMHO, lawmakers haven't shown good judgment about marijuana. Booze hurts many more people and hurts them worse; tobacco kills thousands of people; but we're supposed to accept that marijuana is worse by enough of a margin to place it beyond the legal pale? No way. Again, I'm not claiming that anybody gets to ignore the consequences of the law. The law is what it is. But I don't think you can buttress your valid point about illegality by cherry-picking instances in which the reality justified the law. Those instances, IMHO, are relatively few and far between where marijuana is concerned.

 

That said, as somebody who never touched the stuff, I share your annoyance at the idea that you have to do drugs when you're young or else you aren't any fun. Come on. The best idea the drug culture ever had was that different people can improve their outlooks on life in different ways. For that sentiment to curdle into conformism is pretty pathetic.

 

Greg.

[sbrylski]

I believe marijuana should probably not be illegal. But it is, so don't do it.

[sbrylski]

Or at least don't get caught.

[Team Canada]

TC, you're doing this thing, and BJK did it earlier -- making the point that marijuana is illegal, which is true, and then kind of sliding into the notion that it's dangerous, which more often than not isn't true.

 

I don't recall saying anything of the kind, whether true or not.

[bjkrautk]

Greg -- you're still dealing with the issue from the mindset of moral relativism. Different people are bound to set different levels of what is or is not acceptable for others. My own line calls for no tobacco, drugs or alcohol. (I was happy to read the chapter on DePodesta in Moneyball....just to read how someone else who I consider intelligent draws from the same rationale that I do.) I would have no problem with all 3 being illegal; that's why the argument doesn't hold any weight with me.

 

I don't hold others to that standard; I do expect people to follow the collective lines drawn by this society. If someone doesn't like the country's laws, Amsterdam's that-a-way. (Which isn't to say that someone can't lobby for the laws to change....just that they have to abide by the laws as they are, not the laws they wish they had.) Last time I checked, that's kind of how a society works.

 

Without getting into the political debate on the laws I don't particularly like (Burger court half-a-loaf decisions), I'll make a baseball comparison. Arguing that one kind of drug should be legal because other legal drugs are also bad is kind of like saying that "Player X should be in the Hall-of-Fame, since he hit more HR's than Player Y, who is in the Hall." If it was a mistake to put Player Y in the Hall (assuming there was some objective, bright-line criteria that everyone could agree on....if they knew what it was), using Player Y to justify the admission of Player X is equally mistaken.

 

 

(That being said, I think this argument is probably a bit removed from the suspension itself.)

[gregmag]

TC, you emphasized illegality as the issue (with italics), and then literally the next words out of your keyboard, in your next post, were about harmful effects (Ricky Williams' performance). There are two different issues (at least) here -- illegality and actual consequences of the drug -- and you slipped from one point into the other without qualifying (or justifying) the connection. Are you quarreling with my use of the word "dangerous" to characterize your Ricky Williams reference? I think of impairment of faculties as dangerous, but if you don't, okay: my complaint is that you're conflating an argument about legality with an argument about effects.

 

BJK, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "moral relativism" -- it's an ideologically loaded term, usually employed by conservatives to smear people with whom they disagree when they can't come up with a substantive argument. Obviously that's not what you mean, because you go on to make a substantive argument. Anyway, I'll embrace the label if my other choice is "moral absolutism," which I try sometimes and usually find gets me out of my depth. In this discussion, though, I'm not grinding any substantive moral ax at all. My main point is much simpler: don't confuse the law with what's right and wrong. You're making a perfectly coherent argument that people should obey the law. But you don't have (or at least haven't provided) any justification for bootstrapping that legal argument to a distinct argument about moral rectitude.

 

Anyway, I think you fundamentally misunderstand the context of my argument, which means I haven't been clear enough. I never said Jeffress shouldn't have to obey the law. Of course he should, and my secondary argument that the law is wrong doesn't change that. What I think we disagree about is how baseball's rules should take the law into account. Baseball could treat wife beating as a more serious crime than marijuana use. I think it should. It doesn't. Am I being morally relativistic -- and thus bad, in whatever sense you mean -- to object to that failing? That's where our second disagreement, about moral judgment, comes into play. Simple possession of marijuana is against the law, but that alone doesn't give us much of a basis for moral judgment. Murder is against the law too, but of course the two crimes don't have equal moral weight (unless your objection to "moral relativism" means you think all moral arguments about the law must stop at "crime = bad"). I'm right there with you saying the law must be honored and enforced, but I don't see that alone as a basis for proceeding to paint a scarlet marijuana leaf on Jeffress' chest and branding him as a bad person.

 

Greg.

[bjkrautk]

My general perspective on the law is that it represents the collective morality of a society. The fine print of the social contract. Essentially, a 'lowest common denominator' of what that nation / state / locality is willing to accept from its members. It's by no means perfect, and it's an iterative process that moves at a glacier's pace...and even takes the occasional unfortunate step backward....but generally refines itself over time.

 

From that perspective, crime = bad. The question of "how bad" is separate, and traditionally addressed by the penalties and remedies that are triggered by the infraction. More over, from that perspective, a crime is something running contrary to the society's collective morality. It's a crime because it's morally wrong, not because it's more or less wrong than something else like it.

 

It's that weighing of offenses - using bad conduct to justify or otherwise distinguish other bad conduct - that I would define as "moral relativism." (I think most evil conservative smear-mongers would do likewise, if they had three posts to try and explain themselves. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif) The treatment of other behaviors doesn't make the target behavior more or less wrong.

 

Not only do I have a problem with the roots of the moral relativism argument, but it deftly twists the argument away from talking about the offending conduct. By using alcohol and tobacco as a juxtaposition for our nation's treatment of marijuana, it puts 'Joe 6-pack' on the defensive for his (or her) own vices, instead of discussing the merits of drug use / possession. It also presumes that the legal treatment of the object of comparison is fully valid to begin with. (This is the point I was attempting to make with Hall of Fame example earlier.)

 

 

I don't know that I would disagree with your desire to see a stricter conduct policy for MLB players. (Then again, I'm not a Player's Union rep.) The NFL has shown some leadership in that direction this off-season, albeit out of unfortunate necessity. I would at least posit that there may be some merit in limiting disciplinary action to that subset of bad conduct which affects individual performance and/or the integrity of the sport. After all, the MLB Rules of Professional Conduct exist in addition to the laws of the land; the Wil Cordero's of the world still have to deal with their transgressions in both the courts of law and of public opinion.

 

As an added distinction, I don't think Jeffress is a bad person; I think he's a person who did a bad thing....and now has to deal with the consequences of that choice. There's only one entity with the absoulte moral authority as to what constitutes a truly bad person; I just continue to pray I can live up to 'His' standards.

[mothershipconnection]

Doesn't relative inappropriateness of the infraction influence the severity of punishment, though? Without what amounts to some ordinal ranking system, we'd just call everything "crime" and "crime" is all punished by "aversive consequence".

 

It's not as if society simply defines a cutoff for what is acceptable and what is not. They also do assign some kind of ranking system that's essentially relative - which is why you have stricter penalties for selling a huge amount of heroin than simple possession of marijuana. When we provide the exact same consequence for topographically disparate behaviors, we're saying we consider then equally offensive.

 

Like you said, there are sometimes flaws where our laws don't move quickly enough to reflect that we no longer consider an offense to be punished as severely as another - that's what we see with a lot of marijuana legalization talk. I'd suggest that if you had an objective way of measuring moral values of the country, you'd find that our attitudes toward pot are trending further and further away from the values that prompted many of our laws. Laws punishing cattle theft with death were probably not approved of by the general population for some time before they were officially removed.

[PeaveyFury]

As a reminder, this thread is about Jeffress' suspension, not about whether marijuana should be legal.

 

Considering that we're not even sure that it's relevant to this discussion (as for all we know, Jeffress might have tested positive for Heroin or any number of things other than pot), please keep that in mind.

[Katuluu]

I'd just like to say I am absolutely entranced by the discussion going on in this thread. It's been reasoned and incredibly considerate by all involved despite covering a rather complex subject which could easily stray off course to grounds that aren't allowed on the forum, or quickly turn into outright denigration. Ben and Greg especially have done a great job. Seriously guys, thanks for your excellent contributions to this fascinating thread.

[Team Canada]

TC, you emphasized illegality as the issue (with italics), and then literally the next words out of your keyboard, in your next post, were about harmful effects (Ricky Williams' performance). There are two different issues (at least) here -- illegality and actual consequences of the drug -- and you slipped from one point into the other without qualifying (or justifying) the connection. Are you quarreling with my use of the word "dangerous" to characterize your Ricky Williams reference?

 

 

Yeah, I didn't think that was very accurate. I think "affecting performance" and "dangerous" are fairly different ideas, although if you go and do something stupid, like drive, then yes it's dangerous. And unless I'm missing something, my posts about illegality and Ricky Williams were different posts entirely, and I was responding to someone else's comment, so I don't see your point.

 

In any case, to bring this back to Jeffress, I certainly believe it's fair for 1) MLB to test for any illegal drug, and 2) MLB to test for any substance that is going to affect his performance, and I have no problem with marijuana being in that category.

 

 

[imblotto]

Does anybody think this suspension was inflated because he's a starting pitcher?

[Brian the Automator]

Does anybody think this suspension was inflated because he's a starting pitcher?

It's automatic, isn't it?

 

[Katuluu]

Yeah, it is. Though for the life of me I can't remember the length of the suspension you get for your second and third violations.

[Brian the Automator]

Yeah, it is. Though for the life of me I can't remember the length of the suspension you get for your second and third violations.

The next to logical steps seem to be amputation for a 2nd offense and killing your extended family for a third violation.

 

[dadofandrew]

100 days and then life, I believe.

[mothershipconnection]

Yeah, Salome got the same 50 game length because position doesn't matter like (non drug) disciplinary actions in the bigs.

[TheCrew07]

I've been real busy lately with my own season, but I just saw this and wanted to go on record with Pogo and say that this is definately my least favorite season in a long time. It's one thing to lose all year.... it's another to collapse, have your favorite minor leager traded, and then have numbers 2 and 3 get suspended for violating the controled substance policy. I haven't looked at any minor league stats since football started but at this rate I'm afraid to... Gindl, Lucroy, and LaPorta probably all finished August under .200....

[Tbadder]

Great minds think for themselves, sheep follow the rules.

 

Does anyone think they're testing 20 year olds for beer? It's illegal. How about some consistency if we're gonna turn this issue black and white.

 

And of course you wouldn't test for beer--because it's inane.

[dadofandrew]

I've seen a lot of Cops, and I have never seen any "great minds" get arrested. Must be missing those.