As I had my feet perched up on my rich mahogany centerpiece, shrimp in one hand, cocktail sauce in the other, I thoroughly enjoyed watching our Pittsburgh Stillers and Antonio Brown give the Washington Redskins a firm backhand on Monday Night Football. As I was watching DeAngelo Williams score his second touchdown of the night, it occurred to me that two of the best skill position players in the entire league didn’t lay a toe on Washington’s field and we still put up 38 on opening night. Imagine how ugly that game could have become with both Leveon Bell and Martavis Bryant with the ball in their hands. But without either available due to suspensions regarding the extremely destructive and performance enhancing substance the kids like to call “cannabis”, we have to run our offense through Antonio Brown and DeAngelo Williams for the first three weeks, which I fear could become predictable.

While Leveon was “only” hit with a three game suspension, Martavis Bryant got shilacked with a season long suspension. WHAT? For smoking a joint? On a team that is more than poised to make a run for the Super Bowl in 2016, the 6’5” stud won’t be able to line up outside the numbers once. This is an absolute atrocity to Bryant himself and the entire rest of the Steelers team.  In a profession where your job is PLAYING FOOTBALL, you can be suspended for an entire year for hitting a bong once. The NFL and the rest of society itself must take a step back and ask, “What are we doing?”

Unless you have a job that involves operating machinery or where people’s lives are at stake, business owners all over the country should not be able to invade the privacy of millions of citizens. We as the employees making these business owners the money they pay their bills with should recognize our power that we have and not stand for that. Once your employer is allowed to check on you and see if you’re smoking a blunt or not like a nosy parent, where does it begin or end what they can know about your home and social life?

I’m not advocating that citizens should be able to do coke, HGH, or meth and their employers not know of it, but I full-heartedly believe it is a basic right that if you come to work, have a great work ethic, and are productive, then whatever you do at home is your business and nobody else’s(obviously excluding blatant criminal activity). There are even teams in the league located in states that do not criminalize weed that you can be suspended for the year for smoking if you are a part of the league. The NFL’s stranglehold policy on marijuana is absurd, as is the rest of the businesses in the U.S. of A.