Pass The Juice

In March 2005, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, along with Jose Canseco, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and Rafael Palmeiro sat before noteworthy congressmen and congresswomen on Capitol Hill to discuss the steroid issue plaguing professional baseball. The purpose of the hearings was to eradicate the use of performance-enhancing drugs for posterity—not just in professional sports, but in the youth community across America as well. The use of performance-enhancing drugs by adult men and women is bad enough, but under no circumstances should still-developing young people put these substances in their body. Yet, they do.

At the college level, according to a TA graduate now playing Division 1 football, testing for illegal performance enhancers is taken seriously both internally and by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). He has been tested by his own team five times since he started playing in 2007, and he says that the tests are “extremely difficult, if not impossible to cheat.” He told me that he knows of two teammates who have tested positive in the team-administered tests. The same player told me that the NCAA tests are administered in a similar cheat-proof procedure, but that he has never been tested. This year, the NCAA will drug test 10,500 athletes. To get a sense of how small this number is, even if all these tests were concentrated on college football, which they are not, the 10,500 tests would not even account for ¼ of all football players. Nevertheless, at least at this particular institution, it seems that illegal performance-enhancers are rare. The Thayer grad says that the “staff does a very good job of making sure we go by the rules” and that “the system seems to work well”. But what about in high school, where there is no testing, and students tend to be more shortsighted?

The steroid issue in high school is a nonissue, TA’s own Athletic Director Matt McGuirk believes. After all, he told me, the ISL has never had any incident of steroid use. He offers three reasons for this: first, with the development of advanced workout routines, and ISL students’ easy access to personal trainers, students can reach even the greatest fitness goals without the use of illegal drugs. Second, Thayer’s education about steroid use, including guest speakers and Sophomore Fitness, is effective in deterring students from using performance-enhancing drugs. When I asked him whether widespread steroid use in professional sports sets a bad example for students, McGuirk told me that publicized steroid use is actually the third factor that keeps young athletes from using them. When they see juiced up players like Gary Sheffield or Mark McGwire “lose their respect, pride, and dignity,” student-athletes are dissuaded from reaching for illegal performance enhancers by the worry that the same thing could happen to them. I never thought I’d say this, but thank you, Barry Bonds.

Is Matt McGuirk’s notion the right one, or is it optimistically naïve? Playing D-1 sports is romanticized by varsity players and coaches alike, and with ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and the like, high school athletes are hardly strangers to sports media: they know that stars are born in college, and at some point, all the work in the world just isn’t enough for many high school athletes. Everyone wants to succeed, so everyone works hard—but injecting oneself with illegal and potentially fatal drugs is something not everyone is willing to do. As I was told by the D-I football player, “sports are all some athletes have. They don’t have a great education or skills to fall back on…so they are willing to do whatever it takes to get as far as they can.”

Dangers of steroid abuse are never more pronounced than when they are used by inexperienced young adults. As teenagers mature, their bodies are already chock-full of hormones. When steroids enter the body, they are converted into hormones, of which adolescents have more than enough. Even full-grown adults should never take steroids until they have absorbed every last detail about what steroids are and how they work. Drugs like steroids are just too volatile to play around with. How long a steroid can be used continuously will also differ from one steroid to the next; how much, how many times a day, and into what part of the body a steroid can be administered will also vary. The fact of the matter is that there are just too many things that could go wrong in the process of taking steroids that makes them dangerous, and until one knows everything there is to know about steroids, they should not be used whatsoever.

In 2001 the Center for Disease Control reported that 5% of all high school students had taken steroids without a doctor’s prescription. Although this national data probably does not translate to the Thayer community, it does indicate the possibility that up to five students in every class might have used steroids by the time they graduate.

I asked another former Thayer student-athlete about his experience with steroids. The former Tiger, who will be named Fred to maintain his anonymity, confessed that he had dabbled in steroid use, and said that even as he was taking the drugs, he “didn’t know anything about them except the fact that they worked on my friend.” That’s really all Fred was concerned with: the results. In the minds of many steroid users, it doesn’t matter what the drugs may do to the body in the long run—most don’t even know—as long they are effective in the short run. The oral steroid that Fred was using, Dianabol, resulted in side effects like acne and mood swings, two things that don’t sound like they could precipitate long-term health risks. However, if any type of steroid is misused, it can cause very serious problems such as liver damage, high blood pressure, infertility, and stunted growth. Fortunately, Fred did not renew his steroid cycle after his first 16-day cycle had ended. This must have been a difficult decision, as the steroids that cost him only $50 for a two-week supply produced “great results in only three days.” These drugs work, there’s no doubt about that. The dangers manifest themselves when users turn into abusers, which can easily end up happening when, as Fred did, one obtains steroids from a friend, who gets them from a dealer, who probably doesn’t know all that much other than to tell his clients “Take x pills at y times”.

The potential risks Fred was exposing himself to are numerous. One technique that is common by steroid users is called “stacking”, which involves the use of multiple steroids at the same time. If being supplied by an experienced trainer or doctor who knows all there is to know about the drugs, stacking can be safe and can enhance the effectiveness of workouts. But chances are, if Fred had asked his supplier for some new steroids, the supplier would go out and acquire some new type of steroid that he heard was supposed to work differently, without considering the risks of using multiple steroids at once. Not a lot is known about the exact effects of every steroid, but think of stacking like this: if one was to take golf lessons from two instructors at the same time, they could give contradictory advice that could possibly make one’s game worse.

Just as dangerous as irresponsibly stacking one’s steroids is using the same steroid for too long. While some steroids can be used year-round, the body will not be able to cope with most steroids if they are used for too long. Fred’s Dianobol starts to become toxic after around eight months of daily use. But what does a dealer do when his client continues to purchase the same steroids for several consecutive months? Probably nothing. Fred told me that he would have “definitely” been able to keep purchasing Dianobol, as long as he had the money, and that the supplier “would not have told us [that long-term use of Dianabol is dangerous] because he would just want to make a profit.” These potential problems are amplified during the age of the Internet, where one has the opportunity to buy steroids online.

Check out a website called isteroids.com; it sells illegal steroids to anyone with a credit card. All sorts of oral steroids are sold from prices ranging from $70 to $95 per bottle; the “Pro (Advanced) Bulking Stack” includes 24 bottles of pills and will costs $1200. The site even explains how to avoid getting busted by the Feds during the shipping process. The most disturbing part of the webpage is how difficult it is to find anything resembling a warning about steroid abuse. The only thing I could find was at the bottom of a page titled Effects of Steroids, and the warning states concisely, “Always remember, effects of steroids are very serious. Users do experience bad and negative side effects, so be warned! Do your research.” Yet, there is absolutely nothing to ensure that customers do any research at all; nothing to make sure drugs aren’t being stacked improperly, no one there to monitor long-term use of steroids. It’s actually quite unsettling that this steroid supplier downplays the harmful effects of steroids.

I believe that steroids will continue to be used by the McGwires, Sosas, and Cansecos of professional baseball. And, honestly, I’m fine with that. These baseball players can afford to work with experienced trainers who know all there is to know about how to safely use steroids—because they can be used safely. On top of that, these professional athletes have completed normal human development, and their bodies are not changing at the rate that yours and mine are. So if they want to use steroids, let them. That’s not the problem, and MLB knows that. The problem is when young athletes—kids—hear about these superstars juicing, they think that they can too. They can’t. Even if a student thinks he has absorbed every last morsel of information, even if he thinks his body can handle the drugs, he hasn’t, and it can’t.