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© 2004 special to Drug War
Chronicle, by Steve Beitler -- first in an occasional series on drugs
and sports. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
On February 12, Attorney General John Ashcroft held a press event
to announce indictments for alleged distribution of steroids and money
laundering. That day he did more than spotlight a high-profile case.
Ashcroft deftly opened a new front in the war on drugs, implementing
a strategy that President Bush had signaled three weeks earlier. In
a State of the Union address that didn't mention AIDS, America's obesity
pandemic, or worldwide growth in previously unknown viruses, Bush found
room to say, "The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in
baseball, football and other sports is dangerous, and it sends the wrong
message -- that there are shortcuts to accomplishment and that performance
is more important than character."
The events leading up to Ashcroft's press conference began in June
2003, when a track coach anonymously sent a used syringe to the US Anti-Doping
Agency (USADA). USADA is the American arm of the World Anti-Doping Agency
(WADA), which the International Olympic Committee set up in 1999 as
an independent group chartered with ridding the Olympics and the global
circuit of elite track and field, cycling and other Olympic sports of
the deeply entrenched use of performance-enhancing drugs.
The USADA lab in southern California identified the substance on
the syringe as tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG, a previously unknown steroid.
USADA announced its discovery, saying several athletes had tested positive
for THG, and described a Burlingame, California firm, the Bay Area Laboratory
Cooperative (BALCO), as a "likely source." A week later, a spectacular
grand jury investigation began, featuring testimony from track star
Marion Jones, who won five medals at the 2000 Summer Olympics, and baseball
megastar Barry Bonds.
Bonds's personal trainer, Greg Anderson, was one of four people named
in Ashcroft's indictments; all four had strong ties to BALCO. Founded
in the early 1980s by Victor Conte, a former member of the funk band
Tower of Power, BALCO produced legal supplements that won favor with
world-class athletes. The feds claim that BALCO also provided illegal
drugs, including steroids that were designed to enhance performance
and to evade drug tests.
Ashcroft's indictments were the most public expression to date of
the growing ties between the effort to "clean up" sports and the larger
drug war. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that in 2003, USADA received
nearly $7 million -- more than half its total budget in a grant from
the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the office headed by the
"drug czar." That was an excellent return on the investment of between
$60,000 and $100,000 that, according to lobbying reports, USADA had
made in 2003 with the American Continental Group, a Washington law firm
with strong ties to the Republican Party, to help lobby Congress and
the White House for federal money.
Last April, the Senate Commerce Committee subpoenaed Justice Department
documents related to the BALCO case. A month later the committee, chaired
by Arizona Republican John McCain, decided to turn over evidence in
the BALCO investigation to USADA to help that group in its quest to
keep athletes who had used performance-enhancing drugs off the US team
that went to Athens for the recently completed Olympics.
The renewed fervor to make sports "drug free" raises philosophical
and strategic questions for the reform movement. What do the links between
the sports crusade and the war on drugs portend for the future of the
drug war? Do ideas like harm reduction and responsible use apply to
sports? Or is sports an exception in which zero tolerance is the right
goal? What would an above-ground, regulated drug regime in sports look
like? Finally, what can a reform perspective bring to the debate about
drugs and sports?
Like their counterparts who tackle the destructive fantasy of a "drug-free
America," some scholars are questioning the widely accepted notion that
sports have to be free of drugs to be fair. "Sport is the province of
the genetic elite, or freak. Taking drugs would make sports less of
a genetic lottery," according to Prof. Julian Savulescu and Bennett
Foddy of Oxford University. They cite with approval former Australian
track Olympian Raelene Boyle, who said, "Far from being against the
spirit of sport, biological manipulation embodies the human spirit --
the capacity to change ourselves on the basis of reason and judgment."
Savulescu and Foddy see no difference between elevating your red blood
cell count (which boosts oxygen delivery to the muscles, a desirable
event in endurance sports) by training at altitude, using an air machine
that simulates altitude training, or taking erythropoietin, a popular
drug with cyclists.
Dissenters from the orthodox view also point to the long history
of ingenuity by athletes seeking an advantage. Greek athletes in the
ancient Olympics downed sheep testicles to boost testosterone levels,
a daunting precursor of today's steroids, which build strength in the
same way. Charles Yesalis of Penn State University, who has studied
steroids for more than 20 years, said that "perhaps the most profound
effect that BALCO is having... is debunking the (message) that sports
federations have fed (people) for 30 years, that there's only a few
bad apples in the barrel. There's only a few good apples in the barrel."
Such heresy is unthinkable to the international sports establishment.
US baseball commissioner Bud Selig has set "zero tolerance" for steroids
as the goal, and Craig Masback, CEO of USA Track and Field, that sport's
governing body, noted that "there's no turning back from this. We've
got to embrace this fight." In its zeal to "win" against drugs, sports
officials have embraced drug testing as their main weapon and are deploying
it in ways that could portend its use beyond sports. USADA has increased
drug tests by nearly 100 percent over the last four years, reported
the New York Daily News, in part by implementing an anytime, anywhere,
no-notice policy. Tara Nott Cunningham, a US weightlifter who won a
gold medal in Sydney, is one of about 3,200 elite athletes who receive
regular visits from USADA doping control officers, or DCO's. Cunningham
estimates that she has taken about 100 tests, the scheduling of which
is made easier because USADA requires athletes to submit a quarterly
Athlete Location Form. The form spells out where the athlete will be
every day for a three-month period. Despite its faith in testing, USADA
goes further. Its charter gives it the right to sanction athletes without
a positive drug test.
USADA's zest for tests could soon be trumped by a fast-approaching
new frontier of performance enhancement. Gene therapy and transfer techniques
are showing great promise in enabling scientists to build muscle and
increase the production of red blood cells, with potentially dramatic
implications for people who suffer from muscular dystrophy and other
diseases. The same methods could make athletes better at what they do.
Since some of these methods increase the amount of substances that our
bodies produce naturally, drug testing would face a fresh challenge.
How could it tell what was natural and what wasn't?
Many aspects of drug use by athletes, and the attempts to stamp out
drug use in sports, parallel what reformers have seen in the larger
war on drugs. In the US, the enlistment of the nation's leading drug
warriors in the crusade to "clean up" sports is an ominous new theater
of the drug war. Reformers will increasingly be challenged to engage
or to watch from the sidelines.
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