[Marxism] Very valuable article on anti-steroid campaignl, sports, and war on "drugs"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ISR Issue 50, November-December 2006 
The juice and the noose 

How the steroid hysteria warps our understanding of baseball, politics, and
our very health 

By DAVID ZIRIN 

LISTENING TO the Congress, the media, and the endless yipping of sports
radio, it seems that an anabolic specter is haunting America. USA TODAY
likened steroids to "the bubonic plague of baseball, a pestilence." Congress
has held heavily hyped hearings and called steroids in baseball an
"emergency public health crisis": this while forty-five million people live
without health care. And last year, in a time of war and global conflict,
George W. Bush-the Decider in Chief-took time out of the State of the Union
address to speak on the evil of steroids. The message was clear. Our
children are at risk. Our "national pastime" is at risk. Our sacred baseball
records are at risk: preyed upon by evil, freakishly muscled athletes. As
World Anti-doping Agency chair, the unfortunately named Dick Pound, said,
"How would you like to take your son to a baseball game and you've got your
hot dog and you've got your Coke and you say, 'Son someday if you fill your
body with enough shit, then you can play in your country's national game.'"

Clearly having gotten all the mileage they could out of Janet Jackson's
breast, steroids have become the new Weapon of Mass Distraction. But in
their efforts to hold up steroids as Public Enemy Number One, all the
congressional echo chamber accomplishes is the utter distortion of our
attitudes toward sports, competition, and medicine. This is not to say that
steroids are Flintstone vitamins and should be put in the drinking water.
They can be dangerous biochemistry. But the pitchforks and torches that seem
to surround the discussion prevent an honest look at what they are, what
they aren't, and what role they should play-or not play-in sports.

What's a steroid?

Let's start with what it's not: it's not the source of all evil in the
world. It's not-as baseball Commissioner Bud Selig once said-a "horrible
substance that must be eradicated." There are more varieties and
sub-varieties of anabolic steroids than a freezer full of Ben and Jerry's,
and it seems like you need a Ph.D. in pharmacology to read the sports page,
but at root an anabolic steroid is synthetically produced testosterone-the
principal male sex hormone (though it is also found in smaller amounts in
women). Among other things, testosterone promotes the growth of muscle mass
and strength, as well as bone density. Scientists have attempted to use
testosterone to build muscle going back more than 1,000 years, but the
modern era of steroids started in 1889 during the birth of the Industrial
Revolution. Prominent French scientist Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard was
trying to figure out how to increase the strength and mass of workers. In
his old age, Sequard began to inject himself with a liquid extract derived
from the testosterone of dogs and guinea pigs. He claimed that the
injections "have increased my physical strength and intellectual energy,
relieved my constipation and even lengthened the arc of my urine." 

Sequard may have sounded a little like the villain in the next Spiderman
sequel. But his experiments were very much in line with the dominant
ideologies of Western Europe and the U.S. when industrialists were trying to
figure out exactly how hard a worker could be pushed. Working-class people
were literally lab rats, as children, women, men, young and old were torn
from their homes and put to work for 15-20 hours a day, creating a very
unstable capitalist system that looked like it wouldn't survive the week.
Capitalism of course survived and gave birth to a number of institutions to
pass on its "morals" and "values": like the family, religion, and
regimented, professional sports. This is where Sequard's insights found
their most stable home. 

Athletic trainers and their charges immediately saw the possibilities of
using his research as the sporting industry exploded in the 1920s. Even the
Big Bambino himself, Babe Ruth, injected himself with extract from sheep's
testicles with the hope of increasing his power at the plate (and in the
bedroom). He only attempted this once and it made him incredibly ill. The
Yankees covered up the story by telling the press that the Babe had one of
his famous bellyaches. To my knowledge they have never had "Sheep Testicles
Day" at Yankee Stadium. 

The first synthetic testosterone was developed in 1935, and by the late
1950s, marketable derivatives were finally produced-and this is what is now
known as steroids. The first athletes to use steroids were not baseball or
even football players, but Olympians. State sponsored steroid regimens were
very much a part of the Cold War, in both East and West, as both sides
rushed to see whose athletes could pump up faster. The scope of East
Germany's state-managed doping system wasn't revealed until after the Berlin
Wall fell years later, when it was discovered that more than 10,000 athletes
were given steroids, many without their knowledge, some as young as twelve
years of age, leading both to Olympic medals and long-term health problems. 

In the 1960s, steroids found their way into NFL locker rooms, with trainers
putting them right next to player's plates at mealtime, or leaving them in
lockers. According to a recent book, the 1970s Pittsburgh Steeler dynasty
teams, which won four Super Bowls in six years, passed steroids out among
the linemen like candy. Howard Bryant in Juicing the Game quotes a player
saying, "We knew that if we didn't take the pills we didn't play." 

Many NFL players from that era have lived with terrible health problems and
some have died well before their time. Most famously, Lyle Alzado passed
away in 1991 of brain cancer that he insisted was linked to his prodigious
steroid use. Alzado and sympathetic scientists insisted that the next decade
would see "graveyards filled with athletes" that had juiced. But this didn't
happen. As damaging as they were, steroids haven't proven to be nearly as
dangerous as alcohol, tobacco, or the ever-present "legal" pain-killers
trainers shoot up players with to get them on the field.

This gets to the central issue about steroids. Like any drug or pill, if
abused outside a doctor's care, all kinds of health problems can result.
They can damage the heart, lungs, and liver. They can also affect the
serotonin levels in the brain leading to depression and mood swings referred
to as "roid rage," which has been linked tangentially to several cases of
suicide. Three hundred thousand high school athletes took steroids last
year, a dangerous trend, because of the damage steroids can do to bodies
that are still developing. Young athletes take steroids because they want to
compete effectively-the same reason they take diuretics and painkillers. "I
don't believe kids are taking steroids because they think it helped Barry
Bonds," said Dr. Michael Miletic, a leading sports psychologist, to
columnist Robert Lipsyte. "They're taking it because team-mates, opponents,
a strength coach, a gym owner is telling them it will make them better. And
often it will. I'm more worried about other drugs. Diuretics can kill you
quickly. And pain killers not only mask athletic injuries that should be
attended to, they offer an addictive high."

But taken under a physician's care, steroids can allow people to heal
faster, build muscle mass, and train longer than they would be able to
otherwise. It can also be a lifesaver, particularly for people with HIV/AIDS
and multiple sclerosis. A September 19, 2005, HBO Real Sports report,
bucking the steroids hysteria rampant at the time, noted that there is not a
single scientific study linking steroid use in adult men to death or to
significant health risks. 

It also is a drug that became especially attractive to Major League Baseball
(MLB) players in the 1990s. Baseball is a grueling marathon of a sport that
comes with all kinds of nagging injuries, with its nearly nine-month season,
winter ball, and 162-game schedule. 

The great lie, however, is that major league owners, trainers, and
Commissioner Bud Selig were just "shocked" to learn that steroids had found
a home in major league clubhouses. The real shock is that the media and
Congress have let them get away with this crude fiction. There is a reason
steroid testing wasn't in the collective bargaining agreement until 2003.
The fact is that the infusion of steroids in baseball-the "juicing of the
game," as one writer put it-has been as orchestrated by owners as hat day
and $8 beers. As one player said to me: "It's crazy that punishment is an
individual issue but distribution has always been a team issue." 

The juicing of the game began in earnest in 1994 when a player's strike
mutated into an owner's lockout that led to the cancellation of the World
Series. In a century that saw two world wars, a great depression, and
Reaganomics, this was the first time the World Series had ever been
cancelled. The game's popularity sank to historic lows.

DSHEA and the "Den of Idiots"

The major league owners-called by late Orioles owner Edward Bennett
Williams, "A Den of Idiots"-consciously said we need dingers. Home runs are
how people will return to the ballpark. 

While the Den of Idiots were wringing their hands about how to get more home
runs, an amazing piece of legislation passed the U.S. Congress unanimously
at the bipartisan behest of President Bill Clinton and Utah Senator Orrin
Hatch, called the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act (DSHEA). 

Despite focus-tested buzzwords like "health" and "education," DSHEA was
little more than a criminal giveback to the pharmaceutical industry. DSHEA's
purpose was to shift the burden of proof for the entire health supplement
industry. Previously, a manufacturer had to prove their product's safety.
After DSHEA was passed, the overloaded, underfunded Food and Drug
Administration had to prove a product to be unsafe. As Dr. Stephen Barrett
wrote in a scathing critique, 


Most people think that dietary supplements and herbs are closely regulated
to ensure that they are safe, effective, and truthfully advertised. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Although some aspects of marketing are
regulated, the United States Congress has concluded that "informed"
consumers need little government protection. This conclusion was embodied in
the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 which severely
limits the FDA's ability to regulate these products.

DSHEA's passage spawned the almost overnight creation of the $27 billion
dollar supplement industry, turning the average team's locker room into a
GNC store. Because of DSHEA, teams began to import completely legal
weightlifting and dietary "aids." Many of these are now banned substances.
Androstenedione-or andro-a highly potent steroid derivative, was legal,
available over the counter, and listed as a food supplement. After the 1998
home run race where Mark McGwire kept it in his locker, andro sales rose 500
percent to $55 million dollars per year. Substances like andro were
available in every clubhouse. It started with a few teams, but the pressure
to keep up pushed other teams as well. As former Mets general manager Steve
Phillips said, "I'm hired to win ballgames and if other teams are doing it,
I want my players doing it too." This mentality had deadly consequences.
Ephedra, which was completely legal, was linked to the deaths of both
Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler and Minnesota Viking offensive lineman Korey
Stringer. Now that it has been proven unsafe-with players as the guinea
pigs-it is illegal.

******
 

The entire steroid mess needs to be reframed so we understand that it is
really an indictment of how big-time sports operates in these modern times.

Sports is an enormous industry run to make money-all of it from little
league to professional sports is subject to this. Bosses exploit
worker-athletes and squeeze them to produce just like any other industry, to
work longer, harder, faster. This is why baseball and the bosses loved Cal
Ripken. The guy played 2,632 straight games. This is a neoliberal's wet
dream. The worker who never gets sick. This pressure to perform has
accelerated dramatically in the last few decades with scientific advances.
It has led to a mass industry of performance enhancing techniques,
supplements, and drugs. 

To produce, athletes have always taken performance enhancing drugs. As the
late Buck O'Neill, Negro League great said, "We didn't use steroids because
we didn't have them." This has always been an accepted part of sports and in
fact encouraged by bosses. Moreover, in order to survive the new
productivity squeeze in sports, athletes turn to drugs at an increasing
rate, from painkillers to vitamin regimens to special diets and supplements.

If the Operational Safety and Health Administration investigated sports they
would find a litany of offenses, because sports injures its workers at an
amazing rate. It has one of the highest on the job injury rates of any.
Think of the experience of watching games-another player taken off the field
injured, many for the rest of their lives. To survive, athletes have to
medicate themselves. Watching retired athletes is just painful. Go to a
National Football League Players Association veterans' dinner and you see
people in their forties and fifties with the walk of broken old men. To be a
pro athlete is to be robbed of middle age. It's a deal with the devil that
the poor make to produce for the rich. The minute they can't produce,
they're as expendable as a day-old newspaper. 

Drugs are therefore a result of class in the sports industry, and of bosses
squeezing their workers (the players) to produce. 

That's why it's stupid to blame professional athletes for leading young
athletes to taking performance enhancing drugs. This is as stupid as saying
that violence in our society is the result of kids watching violent TV
shows. Both violent TV shows and social violence are symptoms of the
underlying competitive pressures of a system that forces people to fight
with each other over everything from jobs to sneakers. All the moralizing
about athlete role models is a diversion from what will continue in sports,
however many scapegoats they find. 

Understanding it this way shapes what we should demand. We should oppose
criminalization and massive testing programs, since all this will produce is
ways for athletes to evade programs-like taking masking agents which can be
unsafe-and not touch the underlying motives that drive athletes to turn to
drugs. It also leaves out all the performance enhancing drug consumption
that is legal and approved-like painkillers. 

Instead, we should call for the easing of labor conditions and pressure that
produce the drive toward drug consumption. You would have to change the
material conditions of athletics-namely shorter seasons. A sane game
controlled by the players would say, "Gee, we are putting all this pressure
on our bodies, and the travel is killing us. What do you say we play 140
games instead? Sounds good."

Frankly, I don't think fans would mind a shorter year either. All pro
seasons are too long. In 1999 when the NBA, due to a strike, played a
fifty-game season, a poll of fans said that they actually preferred the
shorter season. 

But the profiteers would never allow that. So instead of making working
conditions more manageable, owners put a tremendous stress on players to hit
home runs, to maintain a sharp edge as a pitcher, or find another line of
work. Players feel a deep pressure to not lose their spot because of a
nagging injury. A manager favors a player who shows he will "go that extra
mile." Juice or fall behind. We should also stand for less of a gap between
minor and major league wages and benefits as part of standardized contracts
not dependent solely on reaching incentives.

These are demands that should be and should have been championed by the
player's union. But the players' union got it wrong. Donald Fehr who calls
himself "an unrepentant '60s radical," and runs one of the most disciplined
unions in the U.S., the Major League Baseball Players Association, correctly
called out the hypocrisy of the steroid hysteria. He correctly said he would
defend players that wouldn't testify to Congress. He correctly called out
the power boom as being a lot more complicated than steroids. He correctly
understood that a main reason the owners flip-flopped from buying steroidal
substances wholesale, to becoming teetotalers was because it allowed them to
bash the union. But Fehr INCORRECTLY never spoke to the reason why players
feel such insane pressure to perform and what the union could do to ease
these pressures. This meant that for the first time in forty years the union
was divided as players who weren't juicing but felt the pressure to do so,
went public and said, "This guy doesn't care about us!" Fehr was left at the
mercy of the owners, and the players' union was weakened as a result.

We need a sane scientific discussion about the pros and cons of steroids and
human growth hormones. Unfortunately, Congress, the media, and the sports
establishment are just not where we are going to find it.




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