Only: Said side effects aren’t the long-term result of smoking weed at some indeterminate point in time, the way repeated hits to the head cause lasting brain damage. No, they’re the acute results of being high in the here and now.

This matters. Matters because Moss is a weed dabbler and a surefire future Pro Football of Fame inductee. Because receiver Santonio Holmes was charged with marijuana possession during the same season he was named Super Bowl Most Valuable Player. Because former NFL lineman Mark Stepnoski admitted to smoking during his career and became a spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws following his 2001 retirement—yet also was a college football All-American, a two-time academic All-American, a five-time Pro Bowl participant, a two-time Super Bowl-winner and a member of the league’s 1990s All-Decade second team.

How did he do it? How did they do it? More than half of the NFL’s players may smoke pot, at least according to a recent informal survey of 48 current and former players, front-office execs, head and assistant coaches, agents, medical professionals and marketing professionals conducted by sports writer Robert Kelmko of the MMQB.com. How do they manage to balance pot and on-field performance?

Simple: They don’t get blazed before or during games and practices. The same way players who drink tend not to down 12-packs of beer while on the job. Tony Villani, a trainer who has worked with 70-some NFL prospects over nearly a decade, once told the Wall Street Journal that he has seen "no correlation" between players' marijuana use and on-field work habits. Granted, some athletes will end up using marijuana irresponsibly if the league lifts its ban—but again, athletes already use non-banned alcohol irresponsibly, and it’s arguably more harmful than pot. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drunk driving kills someone in America every 48 minutes and costs society more than $51 billion annually. Between June of 2012 and September of last year, Time magazine writer Sean Gregory noted, more than 20 NFL players were arrested on DUI-related charges—a number that doesn’t account for two Denver Broncos front-office executives who were arrested for drunk driving.

Prior to this year’s Super Bowl, the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project sponsored billboards around MetLife Stadium depicting a man passed out with a bottle and a football player on the ground that read, “Marijuana: Safer than alcohol … and football.” When I asked MPP director of federal polices Dan Riffle about the campaign, he told me the following:

When you watch a NFL game on Sunday, you can almost get drunk just watching. It’s every other commercial — Bud Light, Coors Light, hot girls and cheerleaders, everyone having a good time glamorizing alcohol. The NFL is obviously in bed with alcohol. If they think it’s an acceptable drug for adults to use and its players to use, why in the world would they think marijuana is unacceptable, and why in the world would they want to punish their players for it when it’s objectively safer?

Speaking of player safety, the NFL’s biggest and most dangerous drug problem doesn’t involve banned substances. Rather, it involves substances that are both allowed and provided by team doctors: prescription painkillers. Injectable numbing agents. Oxycontin and Vicodin. Marcaine and Toradol. Drugs that act less as performance enhancers than performance enablers. Football is a violent collision sport. Chronic pain and frequent, grisly bodily harm are inescapable. When I spoke to league retiree Nate Jackson about his injuries last year, he described separated shoulders, swollen joints, strained muscles and a hamstring nearly torn from the bone. "You never live pain-free in the NFL,” he told me. “You don't discuss it. But you manage pain on a daily basis. Every morning there's this moment—especially when you wake up in training camp—when you're like, what the fuck am I doing? How am I going to make it through this practice? Even getting out of bed is hard.”