'Roid Rage

Anybody wondering where the hell President Bush's call to end steroid use in sports came from? Join the club.

Reps from baseball and football don't know what Bush is talking about, although drug czar John Walters does fess up to a recent long talk with Bush about drugs and sports. The gist seemed to be that the pro leagues could be doing more to stop drug use but are not. Testing, suspensions, and bans evidently are mere window-dressing. Then Walters cryptically concludes it is up to the leagues to solve their own drug problems.

"It's not a government responsibility." Walters said. Just like everything else mentioned in the SOTU, then?

Comments

[Douglas Fletcher]

Bully pulpit. Maybe he isn't so much concerned with the pro athletes as he is with the example they set for all the kids coming up possibly doing damage to their internal organs with that stuff.

[Lane]

Sheesh, I would have thought here of all places people were cynical enough to realize it was sheerly for the photo-op with Tom Brady, plain and simple. MeFi discussion | photo on Drudge

[Patriot]

It's for the children, thanks Douglas. How about people raise their own children and start taking resposibility for what they put in their own bodies?

If the leagues want to ban the stuff fine. If they want to test fine. It's comepletely up to them.

[fake e-mail]

How about we all agree that Bush Jr. is "average"
and move on?

[MK]

H&R posters must not know shit about pro sports, eh?

[Jason Ligon]

What an asinine speech. Every time I resign myself to voting Bush as the lesser of evils, he says something to make me think otherwise.

In a run off of bad vs. worse, I will vote bad to save myself extra misery, but this is getting ridiculous. The last thing I want is a national greatness throwback spending my tax dollars.

Or maybe it is the next to last thing I want. After all, I remember Daschle saying something like, "Only when all Americans are college graduates; only when we have 100% employment, and I mean the fulfilling kind; only when we do whatever the UN tells us to do; only when we spend untold trillions on quesitonable environmental policies, only then will we have the america that Dems want."

Yikes. I hate them all. How do you choose between those visions?

[mojo jojo]

Easy, vote Liberterian.

[Jason Ligon]

mojo:

I have in the past, but only when I was certain that the greater evil was not a threat to win my state. The last time around was all about keeping the author of "Earth in the Balance" out of the presidency.

[Andrew]

Jason,

I can't promise a glamorous election cycle, and I can't promise you a glorious second term...I can promise you that Bush will leave office in 2008, forever.

[kuros]

the stuff about steroid use was put in as a "filler" Bush had run out of other stuff to spew about in his "allotted" time

[John Walters]

Think of the children you bastards!!!! Everything my office does is for the children!!!

[Rick C]

Andrew: The LLL doesn't believe you.

[J. Alexander Lowman]

I am sick and tired of hearing about athletes as role-models and about how horrible it is that athletes use performance-enhancing drugs. For one, athletes are people, and some people will be positive influences on kids, others are awful people. Get over it. Second, if someone wants to use steroids to get bigger, stronger, faster, or whatever, who cares? It's their body. Ok, there may be possible health risks - if playing american football for 10+ years where you are constantly smashing into other huge, strong guys isn't a health risk, how are steroids that much worse? (And yes, I know all the arguments against steroids, I'm over-simplfying things here.)

The analogy I made is if they want to maintain some "purity" in the game of baseball or whatever, not only should steroids not be allowed, than neither should weight training...afterall, you wouldn't be as big or strong or fast if you didn't weight train, so you're screwing up the purity of the game. Of course, that's a way over-the-top analogy, but to me, it's just as ludicrous as the anti-steroid crusade.

[fyodor]

J. Alex,

You made a point I think deserves to be stressed more.

I've read that the average lifespan of an NFL player is something like a mere 55 years. Theses guys are gladiators. They're fun to watch, but they're not worth emulating, steroids or no.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Here I am in the land of the knee-jerks.

I was just speculating on the answer to the question raised about what was going through the President's head, not endorsing what came out of it. Personally I think he has bigger fish to fry, but there's 250 million bozos walking around here who expect him to be all things to all of us.

[Pavel]

Pro Football players don't die at 55 because of steroids or the even the massive amount of amphetamines they're forced to consume (something much less talked about).

Have you seen many Pros lately? Most of the grunts are giant 350lbs. sacks of lard. If you're going to crackdown on substance abuse in athletics, crack down on double cheeseburgers.

When Congress added steroids to the CSA in 1990, it was largely against the advice of the AMA, DEA and most experts. It was little more than a symbolic gesture by the sports establishment to protect its image in wake of the Ben Johnson fiasco and others. This coupled with the issue of "sending the right message to our youth."

There's an interesting release from Joe Biden from that time: "like crack and other hard drugs, steroids can cause serious medical damage. *Worse yet* [emphasis added] using steroids to increase athletic performance undermines the basic values that we learn in sports: namely, hard work, discipline and fair play."

And quarter pounders with bacon.

[Tom]

He was throwing a distraction the way of Weyrich type of conservative, who're pissed of that Bush is not vetoing anything and spending money like a teenage girl at the mall with Mom's credit card in hand. They will predictably start frothing at the mouth about such evils as someone besides them deciding on marriage for everyone, or about all those ghastly 17-year olds toking up....

[Randall Loffelmacher]

They ought to rename it the "War on Some Drugs" ala R.A. Wilson.

[J. Alexander Lowman]

Then they need to have "doper" leagues and "pure" leagues, Joe. Which I think is also a ridiculous idea. Seriously, performance enhancing drugs are no big problem in my eyes. If I were a pro athlete, I'd want every advantage I could have. Probably the only reason I wouldn't use steroids myself (I play a lot of amateur hockey) is because there's no reward if, in fact, the steroids do end up shortening my life somehow. I doubt they will, personally. I agree with Pavel that football players die young because they don't lead a healthy lifestyle in other areas besides drug use.

[joe]

"If I were a pro athlete, I'd want every advantage I could have."

Of course you would, and so would every other pro athlete. In fact, your use would make other pro athletes want that advantage even more.

It's called an arms race, and libertarian philosophy has demonstrated to me a distinct inability to deal with such phenomena.

[J. Alexander Lowman]

It's called self-control and weighing risks vs rewards. When I say every advantage, I don't mean that I would go so far as to knock-off an opponent, but I would put in hours of training and yes, take some performance-enhancing supplement. That may be ephedra before a big game or creatine constantly to help my water retention which is one of it's mechanisms that help your recovery time.

And you act as if every single athlete would need those supplements. Honestly, there are those few athletes who will be great regardless. And if you think they're are a lot of "purists" out there in the sports world, I think you're being naive.

[Jason Ligon]

"It's called an arms race, and libertarian philosophy has demonstrated to me a distinct inability to deal with such phenomena."

An arms race between willing participants who compete in front of people who can choose at any time not to buy tickets. How does one 'deal' with this phenomenon in a non libertarian way?

[Jay]

its probably the only idea that was his in the whole speach.

Mostly he only knows what they tell him. Its not like he studies or anything, which, as Mark Twain noted, is why someone who can read, but doesnt, sounds no wiser than someone who cant read.

Bush will lose...by a clear margin.

The last election was very close.
most who voted against him will do the same and many who thought him good enough have been disappointed enough to move on.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Thanks for the tips from the Psychic Hotline, Jay. Maybe you could tell us what the price of gold is going to be in a year, while you're at it?

[Brian C.B.]

I have no idea where that steriod business came from, either. I can only imagine that there is a key demographic, somewhere, that is fascinated by the mention of steroids. It's trolling for the votes of an obscure ethnic or social group in an swing state that has a pet issue--perhaps steroid use among athletes important to a colony of Mennonite sportsmedicine professionals in Wisconsin. Last year's outlier was the SotU bit on "sexual slavery," largely in Asia. It's a real issue, but in a world filled with AIDS victims and weapons of mass destruction (well, weapons of mass destruction-related program activities) it's not at the top of the list of concerns for most Americans. But it is an issue for some Christian evangelicals, which is how it wandered into last year's speech, and as promptly wandered right out of the Adminitstration's attentions. The steriod reference did give Bush a chance to host Tom Brady of the New England Patriots, and I suspect that might have had something to do with it. Also, given that the Mars thing seemed to have bombed in the polls, he had an unexpected few minutes in the speech to fill.

All in all, I thought it was the least coherent, least compelling presidential speech I can remember watching, the one that touched least on my concerns, which is that the Federal government run amok in both fiscal, domestic law enforcement, and international policy. I got no sense that anyone in control of the GOP has an idea that government power and wealth, though great, are finite. Hence, we'll even try to clean banned substances out of the NFL.

[joe]

"Second, if someone wants to use steroids to get bigger, stronger, faster, or whatever, who cares? It's their body."

It is unfair to the other players who have to compete agains the doper. They will then come under pressure to do the same.

If I smoke a joint, I'm not coercing anyone else to smoke a joint. If an NFL DE is doping, he is coercing the guards he competes with on the field, and the other DEs he competes with for the job, to dope as well.

[Brendan Perez]

" spending money like a teenage girl at the mall with Mom's credit card in hand"

That's an insult to free-wheeling parent credit card using teenage girls at the mall. At least they say "no" to some of their purchases.

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