In a major buzz-kill, the Los Angeles city council voted unanimously to shutter the megalopolis’ 762 registered medical marijuana dispensaries.  Police chief Charlie Beck, who noted that the shops predominantly sold to “healthy young adults,” opined, “If the terminally or chronically ill need pain relief, they can still go to Riverside or see their neighborhood crack dealer.”  And before booking a flight to Amsterdam on KLM, consider that a Netherlands court just upheld a law banning foreigners from cannabis cafes.  Lamentably, Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s VVD party victory in yesterday’s Dutch election all but ensures the demise of open market sales to nationals as well. The benefits of all this, I guess, fall to newly merged South American airline LATAM.  The carrier recently reported a 7.9 percent increase in passenger traffic, mostly on flights to Uruguay, where the government is setting up shop as a dope peddler.   As President José Mujica averred, “Users are enslaved by an illegal market.  They follow the path to crime… they become dealers because they have no other financial means to satisfy their vice.  Better that I am the dealer.”

Sadly, the international community doesn’t share such a cavalier attitude towards 420 evinced in Uruguay or, say, Portugal. Therefore, the reflex to blame athletes for failing to comply with drug guidelines is understandable: American wrestler Stephany Lee was banned from the London Games due to a positive marijuana test a month before judoka Nicholas Delpopolo was booted from the Olympic Village for scarfing a couple of pot brownies.  Couldn’t these dopes have simply held off until after the closing ceremonies?  (Admittedly, enduring Annie Lenox and Brian May necessitated digging more that a few roaches out of the couch.)  Yet, in their defense, one can see how athletes might trip over blurry rules of conduct.  Recall that heralded swimmer Michael Phelps received a piddling three-month suspension in 2009 after being photographed burning a reefer.  Moreover, Winter X Games participants are actually required to get high before competing.  After several skier cross contestants passed blood tests during last year’s games in Aspen, the event was summarily expunged from the 2013 schedule.  Senior Director Tim Reed:  “These decisions are never easy, but obviously those racers who were not stoned had a clear advantage.  We need to make sure the event is enjoyable to the fans and we can’t do that unless everyone is crashing into each other.”

True, Phelps never failed a drug test, but then again neither did Lance Armstrong.  While U.S. authorities have banned the cyclist for life and have stripped him of his seven Tour de France titles, Roger Clemens, for whom an equal number of witnesses testified to his use of PEDs, gets to keep his seven Cy Young awards and is being courted back to the majors with the pomp and ceremony usually reserved for heads of state or Justin Bieber.   The lack of consistency is glaring:  Both former Cy Young winner Bartolo Colon and All Star MVP Melky Cabrera received 50-game suspensions for using steroids, whereas NL MVP Ryan Braun got off scot-free simply because FedEx took an extra day to ship his synthetic-testosterone-laden piss to baseball headquarters.

Admittedly, high profile athletes bear immeasurable pressures to perform.  Witness Belarus shot putter Nadezhda Ostapchuk who was stripped of her Olympic gold medal last month after testing positive for a banned anabolic steroid.  In retrospect, using a mass spectrometer to detect metenolone in her system seemed superfluous after two collection monitors documented that Ostapchuk “shook several excess beads of urine off the end of her penis after filling the specimen cup.”   Notably, the Olympics embody the spirit of hewing to ancient traditions in a modern world.   So while it is almost de rigueur for a former Soviet-bloc athlete to get caught cheating, the London games showcased a few contemporary twists on this old theme.  To wit: A Swiss soccer player was sent packing for inappropriate Tweeting while Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen used a new, and, as of yet, undetectable, substance to skip across the water faster than the Cigarette boat used in the opening sequence of “Miami Vice.”  Meanwhile, Ann Romney’s horse Rafalca narrowly missed the medal round, and therefore ducked any embarrassing drug tests.   Which, given Mormon Mom’s penchant for juicing lame horses, could have proved problematic.  United States Equestrian Team veterinarian Steven Soule regarding Romney’s former horse Super Hit: “In my 38 years of practice, I have never come across a drug screen such as this where the horse has been administered so many different medications at the same time.”

Even before the torch was lit, the Israeli synchronized swim team (trainingincognito as “Friends of the IDF”) stirred memories of Munich when they wereforcibly evicted during a practice session at the Shangri-La hotel in Santa Monica, CA.  As soon as the hotel’s owner, Pakistani Muslim Tehmina Adaya, discovered the ethnicity of the swimmers, she screamed to staff members, “Get the fucking Jews out of my pool!”  True to form, the Kikes sued and garnered their own version of gold – $1.6 million in damages.  And, in a sad coda to the games, Director Tony Scott failed in his attempt to recreate David Boudia’s podium-topping performance in the high dive, belly-flopping to his death from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro.   While authorities await toxicology reports and attempt to cobble together a motive, one can only believe years of playing second fiddle to his far more talented brother Ridley finally took its toll.  How would you feel if your crowning glory was “Beverly Hills Cop II” while your sibling created such masterworks as “Blade Runner”?  Yet history is replete with lesser siblings carrying on in deference to their more gifted kin.  Recall Dom DiMaggio or Emillio Estevez.  Worse yet are the tragic cases where the headliner croaks first and we are left with a talentless Jim Belushi or Jimmy Vaughn.

But we fans take what we can get.  And with investigations closing in on the basketball programs at UNC, Duke and Harvard, one can only hazard what penalties will be meted out in the wake of the Penn State scandal, in which the NCAA showed, by erasing victories and eliminating scholarships, a penchant for overreach.  I may be in the minority, but I feel the removal of Joe Paterno’s statue from Beaver Stadium was unwarranted.  It simply cannot be true that the moment JoePa was immortalized in bronze, index finger proudly aloft, he was seriously thinking, “Hey, Jerry, come smell this.  I just penetrated little Bobby Rizzoli’s damp, quivering boy hole.”