The question isn’t why kids take steroids. Rather, it is why the great majority of teens aspiring to be professional athletes don’t take steroids, and why we do virtually nothing to attempt to stop the minority who do.
Statistics vary but the latest national survey of steroid use among teens reports that 3.5 percent of high school seniors admitted to using steroids at least once. That doesn’t sound like a lot. But it’s a 67 percent increase over the 1991 and a 17 percent increase over figures cited by the National Institute on Drug Abuse in 1999.
So, while the numbers look small, they’re rising rapidly, and that’s an indictment of an education system that would rather invent reasons why it can’t -– or won’t -- do anything about it than find ways to stop it.
The Olympics tests for steroids and every other performance-enhancing drug. Pro sports leagues test. Colleges test. High schools, with just a few exceptions, don’t test. And if you don’t test for steroids, you are telling kids to go ahead and use them, because they won’t get caught.
You can lecture kids all you want about the dangers of steroids, about the incredible shrinking testicles and acne blooms and possible liver damage down the road. There are always going to be some, just as there are some athletes at every stage of competition, who are willing to take the risks if they can see a clear reward.
Major League Baseball is experiencing a public relations nightmare because, until last year, it didn’t test for any drugs, including steroids. Because it didn’t test, players –- and no one knows how many –- used those drugs as well as human growth hormone to get bigger and stronger. Records fell. Kids watched. And they imitated their heroes.
A recent Associated Press story on the subject of kids and steroids quoted various high-school officials giving what, for many, is the standard excuse: They can’t afford the $50 it costs for each steroid test. For other school systems, including those in New York and New Jersey, civil rights are cited by the few administrators who will even talk on the record about the subject.
But in the same AP report, schools that don’t test for steroids do test athletes for other drugs such as marijuana and cocaine. The tests for so-called recreational drugs are relatively inexpensive, but if you’re going to test for drugs that don’t enhance performance, you’re just playing to the bleachers: “Look, we’re testing the athletes for drugs.” But you’re not testing them for the drugs that matter in this regard, the ones that equate with cheating.
Until we do test, the numbers of kids taking the drugs will continue to rise, because the upside of cheating –- especially when you can’t get caught -– is incredible.
Hero status and a Hummer
We celebrate people who are big and strong and fast and skillful, idolize them, buy the products they endorse, dress like them, talk like them, worship the socks they sweat in.
It isn’t something we invented, another product of modern decadence. The Greeks idolized athletes and warrior-heroes and were obsessed with physical appearance. Win at the ancient Olympic Games for your city-state and you were set for life, as big a star in that world as athletes are today.
We devote magazines and large sections of our newspapers and television networks and clear-channel radio stations to recording their every move and dissecting their games, talents and lives.
And we pay them millions upon millions of dollars so that they live like feudal lords, with the exception that they owe allegiance to no one.
Who wouldn’t want a piece of that? What kid with a competitive itch and above-average coordination wouldn’t want to get all of that, especially if it involves playing a game in public and being allowed -– encouraged even –- to spit and scratch without losing social style points.
If you ever played sports as a kid and had any degree of talent you stood in the driveway shooting free throws. You were playing in the Final Four, the national championship game, for State U., 50,000 people screaming in the stands, millions watching on television, a dozen or more of the most beautiful women on campus cheering for you on the sidelines.
You were down a point with no time left. Sink both foul shots and your team wins, you’re a hero, you get drafted in the NBA lottery, you buy a Hummer and a Porsche and an Escalade and live in a house so big you need a golf cart to get around in it.
Or you spend every quarter you can cadge at the batting cages, and now it’s the bottom of the ninth in the World Series. You’re playing for the Yankees and you’re down three, two outs, bases loaded, the game’s greatest relief pitcher on the mound. You take him deep and two weeks later sign a $40-million contract to endorse hamburgers and show up in People magazine with a super model on each arm.
On the edge between big-league and also-ran
As we grow, most of us realize we don’t have the talent to reach that dream. But the few who do lock onto it and devote themselves to reaching secular Nirvana. The very few who have surpassing talent have their paths clear. But a lot of kids are on the edge between big-league and also-ran.
Forty years ago, the kids who weren’t quite big enough lifted weights to get bigger. Then diet became a big issue and advanced types of training. Eventually, these magic drugs that make your muscles grow like kudzu became popular.
Arnold Schwarzenegger launched a career that has taken him to the California Governor’s mansion on steroids. Vince McMahon’s pro wrestling empire got where it is via the same vehicle. NFL locker rooms 20 years ago looked like Mr. Universe conventions. Muscles were definitely in.
It’s a different world in the NFL today. You don’t see the 300-pound guys with 3 percent body fat anymore. You get caught doing steroids, it’s a four-game suspension for the first offense. It’s not worth it.
But it is worth it in high school, because you can’t get caught. The rewards of being one of the few who makes the big time are enormous. When you’re talking to kids who feel immortal, dire warnings of what can happen down the line don’t cut it.
We have to find the national will to test for performance-enhancing drugs at the level at which the greatest numbers compete, at the level at which kids are being told every day that if they get bigger and stronger, they can make it to the next step on the climb to superstardom.
And it can’t be left to the individual school systems. When they say they don’t have the money, they’re not just avoiding the issue; they’re being honest. State governments and the federal government, which are bigger on talking about education than actually paying for it, have to find the money to do this.
It’s not really an option, something we can do or not do. We want our competition to be clean. That means testing kids in high school. Now.