Key on testing preps, not pros, for 'roids
Posted: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 11:29 PM
I don’t agree that often with commissioners of sports leagues, but I’m with them on this one. Congress has no business getting involved in running their drug-testing programs.
The heads of the four major team sports leagues – MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL – were hauled down before a congressional subcommittee on Wednesday, and not the same one that so recently hosted Roger Clemens. You’d think one would be enough to straighten out something that’s not broken, but you’d be wrong. If it’s worth doing at all in Washington, it’s worth overdoing. If only they’d be that vigilant about their other business.
There are a number of problems with these dog-and-pony shows. One is that if Congress is going to pick on the four major sports, they should pick on all of them. Where are tennis, golf, soccer, beach volleyball, auto racing, figure skating, skiing, snowboarding? Is it that they aren’t important or that they can’t generate headlines?
The bigger flaw with this obsession is that it doesn’t go to the source – high school. Every congressperson makes sure to talk about how concerned he or she is with the nation’s young, but none have shown any willingness to do anything but berate the professional big shots, as if there are extra points for making Bud Selig squirm. Hey, folks, I’ve got news for you: it’s not that hard.
You can’t get teenagers to quit doing anything by preaching to them. The abject failure of abstinence-only sex education is all the proof you need of that.
There have been two major steroid busts in the past three years. The first bagged Victor Conte, the BALCO founder who gave us Marion Jones, Barry Bonds and a host of others. He spent a grand total of four months in prison. The other is ongoing out of Albany and has most recently implicated Mary J. Blige and 50 Cent. But no one’s doing hard time in prison.
Meanwhile, there are still about 50,000 people in American prisons for marijuana-related offenses, thanks to a national drug policy that ignores the half a million people killed each year by alcohol and tobacco and throws people in jail for growing pot.
If Congress really wants to save our kids from steroids, they can take some money from the failure that is the war on drugs and put it into testing programs for high school sports. As I write this federal and state governments had spent more than $8 billion so far this year on that never-ending and unwinnable “war.” That total increases every second by more than $600. There’s a running total at drugsense.org. Check it out and watch your tax dollars at work.
I personally don’t care if knuckleheads want to do steroids to look better on the beach or forestall the effects of aging. Congress probably shouldn’t either, if only because you can be certain that some aging members are taking the drugs themselves.
But if it’s a level playing field we want, then we need to attack the problem where it begins. The pro leagues are steadily getting better in their testing policies. There’s nothing wrong with nudging them along. And Donald Fehr, the head of baseball players association, made a suggestion to Congress that is stunning in its brilliant simplicity: require drug manufacturers to attach a chemical signature to synthetic human growth hormone so it will show up in a urine test.
For all their alleged concern, why didn’t anybody in Congress think of that?
