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Test teen athletes nowDate: 15.11.2006
Posted by: Anabolic Info Team United States
Steroids scandals often focus on pro sports, but the bigger story is in high schools, where kids think the benefits are worth the health risks. Mandatory testing could curb this dangerous trend.
By Robert Lipsyte
Steroids scandals often focus on pro sports, but the bigger story is in high schools, where kids think the benefits are worth the health risks. Mandatory testing could curb this dangerous trend.
(Illustration by Sam Ward, USA TODAY)
Saving David is going to be very expensive and difficult, especially since David, his parents, his football coach and his school want to keep David just the way he is, swollen with steroids and knocking down other boys on his way to victory.
Even as the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative takes new turns and pro football and baseball players have recently been suspended for steroid use, the real intervention must be this: mandatory testing for high school football players.
David is a real boy whose name has been changed for obvious legal reasons. He was a 17-year-old high school junior when he was referred last spring to a Detroit-area psychiatrist, Michael Miletic, because of poor grades and depression. David's parents were upper-middle class and divorced, according to Miletic. David's haven was football, at which he excelled; he reveled in his father's pride at his success.
At first, Miletic thought treatment was going well. David's grades and depression were improving. Over the summer, he also grew physically, bigger muscles, better defined. He animatedly described his weight-lifting workouts to Miletic, a former Olympic heavyweight lifter.
Peer pressure
Then David's face began to look bloated, and his arms and neck became splotched with acne, signs that he was taking steroids. He was nonchalant when Miletic confronted him. Everybody at his gym was doing it; it was his ticket to a college scholarship and maybe the pros. He was paying his $1,500 monthly bill for testosterone, steroid Deca-Durabolin and human-growth hormone with his dad's debit card.
David is playing high school football this season, one of almost a million young men in a sport in which the stakes are spiraling upward as colleges and the pros scout for talent down to the middle-school level. More and more high school games are televised locally. ESPN and Fox Sports will nationally televise at least 21 games. NBC is airing a new drama, Friday Night Lights, based on the movie and bestseller about Texas high school football. MTV is offering Two-a-Days, a high school football reality show. Naming rights for high school stadiums in Texas routinely are sold for $1 million.
Miletic seethes with frustration. He tried to alert David's parents to the serious health consequences steroids could inflict on the growing adolescent brain and body. But they were in denial and brushed him off. David was furious at what he took to be Miletic's "betrayal." He quit treatment. Because David had turned 18 and was "protected" by patient confidentiality laws, Miletic had nowhere else to turn. He could go no further in alerting people who might stop David's drug use. This is no aberrant anecdote.
"The statistics from surveys show that in your average high school/middle school (grades 6 through 12) with a population of about 1,000 — 30 to 40 kids have cycled (taken more than just one shot) at least once with anabolic steroids," says Bruce Svare, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the State University of New York at Albany. "Steroids are cheap and easy to obtain over the Internet and in local gymnasiums and workout venues. Many bodybuilding websites have chat rooms and message boards where kids learn about steroids and how to use them. We don't have the luxury of sitting back and doing nothing."
Adults in denial
Svare, who also heads the National Institute for Sports Reform, lectures on the subject. When he calls for mandatory testing, parents, communities and coaches first tell him they have no steroids problem; then they cite the high cost of testing and the violation of confidentiality and parental rights. "When they say that," Svare says, "I shoot back, 'But kids are dying from this. ... What is the alternative? To see more kids die?' "
There is anecdotal evidence of teens committing suicide after quitting steroids. Reports on the use of performance-enhancing drugs by the now-defunct East German Olympic machine contain dozens of examples of long-term reproductive and behavioral problems as well as elevated cancer risks and heart, liver and kidney damage. But long-term studies don't exist.
"It's an outrage," Miletic says, "that we spend all this time and energy moralizing about Barry Bonds and the Tour de France and nothing on finding out exactly what these drugs are doing to our kids. Is it because we don't want to know?"
Jim Thompson, executive director of Stanford University's non-profit Positive Coaching Alliance, says he is not opposed to random testing but thinks the cost makes it unrealistic as a blanket strategy. He would make it mandatory for teams appearing in nationally televised games and would add both education and counseling, for win-at-all-cost coaches as well as their players. "I've been struck by the importance of identity around this issue," he says. Teenagers are so passionate about making the team "that doing something 'irrational' like taking drugs with horrible long-term health effects seems like a reasonable thing to do."
It certainly seemed reasonable to David who, as his senior season progresses, is probably becoming a role model to young athletes who know exactly how he got to be so big and strong.
Meanwhile, Miletic observes uneasily from the sidelines. He says, "We have metal detectors in our schools. Police routinely pull kids over to search for alcohol and drugs. We have a potential national crisis here. Are we just going to sit back and watch it on TV?"
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