Dallas ? It just seems like it, but the truth is that Randy Moss really hasn’t missed a game this season. Despite facing a misdemeanor charge for marijuana possession stemming from a traffic arrest, after reportedly having failed a drug test for marijuana a season ago, Moss has played every Vikings game this year.

The NFL doesn’t suspend first-time offenders of its policy against illegal drug use. It sends them to a counselor and subjects them to regular testing for a period of time.

But Julius Peppers, the rookie Carolina defensive end, recently entered an appeal of an automatic four-game suspension for testing positive for ephedra, a stimulant found on health-food store shelves but which is banned by the league. A handful of other players have suffered the same consequences. And Peppers claimed the stimulant was in a product he took that didn’t list it as an ingredient.

Giants’ defensive back Jason Sehorn lambasted the league for what he said were its inconsistent and inequitable penalties dealing with illegal drugs and banned stimulants.

“You want to snort some cocaine, get yourself high, get caught, now you go in a program,” Sehorn told the New York Daily News. “They put you in a drug program to try to help you, which is good, but you can keep on playing.

“But you want to take some ephedra that is sold over the counter, that is legal, that they’re trying to say could kill you … because somebody died somewhere? I’m an athlete now – and we’re gone four games. Gone.”

Better to be gone for four games, though, than be gone forever.

Neither the league nor the players’ union, which negotiated penalties for stimulants as stiff as for steroids, will put the explanation for the apparent unfairness in such stark terms, but that’s the thinking – life or death.

As far as they know, they haven’t had a player die or collapse from smoking marijuana.

“We know we’ve had an ephedra-induced episode,” NFL Players Assn. executive director Gene Upshaw told me Friday from his Washington office. Upshaw said the player’s heart stopped.

And Upshaw wasn’t talking about Korey Stringer, the Vikings’ lineman who collapsed during training camp two summers ago and died. Officially, Stringer was killed by heatstroke. But a report broke after his death that ephedra-laced products were found in his locker room stall.

We do know that at least two other football players – one college player and one minor-league player – who died while training a couple of summers ago were found to have ephedra in their bodies.

Ephedra wasn’t blamed in any of those deaths. But it has been charged with doing things to the body, like revving up the heart, which can prove unhealthy, despite making it easier to exercise strenuously. I know. I took an ephedra product, and experienced its glorious upside, until being frightened off by the reports.

The league and the players’ union are right to employ zero tolerance when it comes to stimulants like ephedra. It is for the players’ own good, even if it is a more harsh penalty for first-time abusers than what they would suffer for using illegal drugs.

“It’s not inconsistent,” Greg Aiello, a league spokesman, said of how the league treats differently abusers of stimulants and illegal drugs. “It’s two different issues.”

Upshaw concurred.

The stated reason the penalties for abusers of stimulants is so stiff is because stimulants are the cheater’s way of gaining a competitive advantage.