Speaking of Drugs....

...as T.O. now knows, (allegedly) taking a bottle of them can be bad for your health.

I swear...sometimes it's absolutely surreal to be a Cowboys fan. I'm very much in the crowd of those who believed that ol' T.O. coming to the Cowboys was going to mean a lot of distractions, a downhill slide to irreconcilable differences, and the permanent destruction of Owen's NFL career (and less permanent but painful destruction of the Cowboy's playoff hopes.) But...an alleged suicide attempt? That'll catch out of the blue. The only thing I'm not surprised by is the utter and incredible 24-hour media circus that has followed.

So you're dying to know, what do I think happened? Well, unlike this fella here I don't quite buy Owen's version of events because...well, it makes so sense. It's entirely plausible that he could've ended up in the hospital after an allergic reaction to pain pills. It's less plausible that he could have had such a reaction a week or more after he's had the pills, but maybe he's sensitive to them and took 1 or 2 too many after a rough day and that set him off. But who, upon being treated at an emergency room, tells the cops that he's been depressed and was trying to hurt himself? How "groggy" do you have to be to say something like that? No, something more happened here. Whether Owen's was making a serious suicide attempt, or a "cry for help", or just took too many pills because he likes them and they feel good and make him say crazy things he'd never actually say while not under the influence of narcotics...well, who can say?

The flat-out denials by Owen's and his publicist (that incidentially impugn the integrity and intelligence of the Dallas PD) are, as Jim Reeves notes, merely adding to the confusion as opposed to clearing things up. But that's the point. Of course it would be best if everyone just believed what Owens was saying about this and forgot all about it. But short of achieving that, if they put enough doubt in people's minds about what really happened, they can claim it was all some kind of crazy misunderstanding and eventually outlast the questioning and the speculation and the doubts. More importantly, Jerry Jones and Bill Parcells and the rest of the Cowboy crew can also put this bizarre incident behind them and get Owens back out on the field.

The flaw in this approach is that if something more than an "allergic reaction" happened last night, then Owen's has some serious issues he needs to deal with, and you have to wonder if sticking him back out on the field is really the way to go. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's another "incident" of some kind or another in the not too distant future that nobody is going to be able to deny.

Welcome to Cowboys-land.