Georgia Football should seek new answer for Marijuana policy

It’s not working:

This calendar year, Georgia has had 3 players arrested for possession of Marijuana. All 3 of them had under 1 ounce, which meant that all of the situations were misdemeanours. They were all small arrests, little things where players were spending time alone or with a few others.

If the point of the suspensions is to frighten the players into not making these sorts of mistakes, it isn’t working. Riley Ridley and Elijah Holyfield are young players. They are sophomores this year who hadn’t even been in Athens for 12 months when they made their mistakes.

Natrez Patrick is a Junior. He should know better, especially having been arrested before. You would think that a 4 game suspension in his junior season would be a deterrent. But it wasn’t and that says it all. Marijuana is seen by many as such a small thing, that a big suspension just doesn’t register.

For me, the main reason for the current policy existing is prevention. I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for football players to be smoking weed and I would rather they didn’t. But the student handbook isn’t stopping that from happening. It’s not having an effect. Therefore the only thing these suspensions are doing is hurting our teams when someone gets caught.