Publication Date:
May 22, 2005
As the U.S. Congress prepares to renew its assault on anabolic
steroid use among professional athletes at a hearing scheduled for
May 18, longtime observers of doping control initiatives will
recognize the selective indignation that continues to sensationalize
the use of these drugs by athletes. The fact that certain groups of
steroid consumers have been spared the special opprobrium reserved
for sports heroes who fail to serve as proper "role models" for
youth demonstrates once again how arbitrary and politically
motivated the formulation and enforcement of drug laws can be.
One of the remarkable anomalies of the anti-steroid campaign of
the past two decades is that it has virtually ignored the many
reports of steroid use by police officers in the United States and
in other countries. Unknown but clearly significant numbers of
policemen have imported, smuggled, sold, and used anabolic steroids
over this time period. According to an article that appeared in the
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin in 1991: "Anabolic steroid abuse
by police officers is a serious problem that merits greater
awareness by departments across the country." (1) In 2003 another
expert offered a similar assessment. Little research has been done
on the use of steroids by police, said Larry Gaines, former
executive director of the Kentucky Chiefs of Police Association.
"But I think it's a larger problem than people think.".(2)
A segment of the CBS-TV program "60 Minutes" had already made
that point on November 5, 1989. "Beefing Up the Force" presented
interviews with three officers whose use of steroids had apparently
caused the hyper-aggressiveness that had gotten them into serious
trouble. The worst case involved what one psychiatrist called "a
real Jekyll and Hyde change" in the personality of a prison security
guard in Oregon who had kidnapped and shot a woman who made a casual
remark he didn't like. He got 20 years in prison, and she was
paralyzed for life. The personality he presented during his prison
interview made it seem utterly improbable that he would have been
capable of such an act. But his testosterone level when he committed
the crime was 50 times the normal level. This broadcast conveyed the
message that steroid problems were lurking in many police
departments across the country, and that police officials were
turning a blind eye to a significant threat to public safety.
It was no accident that the "60 Minutes" segment paid special
attention to a "hard core group" of steroid users on the Miami
police force. Two years earlier the Miami Herald had run a
long article on steroid-using police officers. The seven notorious
Miami "River Cops", who in 1987 were on trial for alleged crimes
including cocaine trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder,
included Armando "Scarface" Garcia, a weightlifter who had publicly
admitted to taking steroids. "There's a great potential for an
officer abusing steroids to physically mistreat people," said the
police chief of nearby Hollywood, Florida, who had told his
investigators to be on the lookout for officers who looked like
"small mountains." (3) The Miami Herald article may have been
the first of the tiny number of analytical treatments of this
subject that have appeared in American newspapers since the 1980s.
It is not surprising that police officials spent the 1980s more
or less oblivious to the steroid issue. The notoriety and eventual
demonizing of the anabolic steroid followed the Ben Johnson Olympic
scandal of September 1988, which initiated the transformation of the
social (and then the legal) status of these drugs. The Anabolic
Steroids Control Act of 1990 made unauthorized possession of
steroids a criminal offense, and from that point on the anti-steroid
crusade was gradually annexed by the larger War on Drugs that
Richard Nixon had launched in 1969. The BALCO "designer steroid"
indictments announced by the Department of Justice in February 2004
gave the federal takeover of the anti-steroid campaign an official
status it had never had before.
Prohibiting police officers from using anabolic steroids would
appear to be self-evident given what is known about how these drugs
can produce hyper-aggressive behavior. But understanding the use of
these drugs by police officers and other men whose professional
roles involve physical strength and assertiveness requires us to
examine the two opposing arguments that have been advanced to favor
or oppose the use of steroids by law enforcement personnel. The
functional argument holds that the physical and psychological
effects of steroids promote the safety of the officer and,
therefore, public safety, as well. The deviance argument holds that,
on the contrary, both the physical and emotional effects of the
drugs endanger the public and expose drug-taking officers to serious
legal risks resulting from their dangerous drug-induced behaviors.
The idea that steroids might actually play a functional (and
therefore legitimate) role in preparing police officers to do their
jobs was not beyond the pale in 1987. For example, the Miami
Herald exposé prompted a former Miami police chief, Ken Harms,
to make the following comment: "It's probably time that the
department makes a conscious decision about whether it's acceptable
for officers to take steroids." (4) The sheer political
incorrectness of this statement, when judged by today's standards,
speaks volumes about how the social status of these drugs has
changed in the interim. Although Chief Harms did not go on to parse
the pros and cons of steroid-taking by police officers, it is not
difficult to imagine what he might have said.
Large numbers of men around the world consume steroids because
their professions or criminal activities require physical
self-assertion and self-confidence. A 1996 report from Scotland, for
example, identifies policemen, firefighters, military personnel, and
private security guards as steroid consumers. (5) In Australia the
list includes prison guards and the elite troops who in 1998 were
discovered to be "using steroids to bulk up, boost stamina and
self-esteem and to recover more quickly from injuries they have
sustained." (6) In Britain, Australia and some European countries,
nightclub bouncers use the drugs to produce the "frilled neck lizard
response" that intimidates unruly customers. (7)
"The thinking is that big is better than small, tough is better
than weak," says Gene Sanders, a former police officer and a
longtime police psychologist in California. "There is sort of an
underground, unspoken tradition among several departments that I've
worked with that if you really want to bulk up, this is the best way
to do it." (8) A website maintained by the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) reports the same attitude toward functional
steroid use by police officers: "Law enforcement personnel have used
steroids for both physical and psychological reasons. The idea of
enhanced physical strength and endurance provides one with 'the
invincible mentality' when performing law enforcement duties." (9)
Steroids are also used by criminals as aggression-enhancing
drugs. In Oslo, Norway, enforcers known as "torpedoes" take
combinations of steroids and amphetamines to produce the
psychopathic state that enables them to kill and maim their victims.
(10) Danish motorcycle hoodlums put methyl testosterone capsules
under their tongues before gang fights to work themselves into a
rage. (11) Such vignettes from the steroid underground suggest how
little we know about the overall social effects of the black market
that serves an international market of action-oriented males that
includes a growing number of recreational athletes of all ages.
The functional argument thus proposes that steroid use is an
essentially rational and practical strategy to deal with the special
challenges and hazards of certain kinds of physically demanding
work. From this perspective, these action-oriented professionals --
"[o]ccupational users such as doormen [bouncers], police and prison
warders … have a definite objective; often feeling threatened by
aspects of their work they believe they must increase their size and
aggression both to threaten and protect others." (12)
Russell Dobash, a professor at Manchester University, has also
pointed to the practical attitude of some steroid users:
"Bodybuilding is most often the entrée to taking steroids, but
people who take the drugs often do it because they see their body as
important to their job. Some people have the stereotypical image of
a bodybuilder as unemployed. But in a sample of steroid-users that
we looked at, there were a range of occupations, particularly among
professions where your body can be instrumental to your job." (13)
The conflict between the functional and the deviance models of
steroid use can be seen in "the stereotypical image of [the]
bodybuilder" as a socially dysfunctional (unemployed) type whose
deviance lies in the social disorientation that has left him with no
economic role in society. His functional (and socially useful)
counterpart is someone who puts drugs to "instrumental" use. We have
already seen that the use of steroids by police officers has been
regarded as instrumental pharmacology of this kind by at least a
segment of the profession. However, given the long tradition of
prohibitionist thinking about "drugs" in modern societies, it is
hardly surprising that condemnation based on the deviance model of
police steroid use has been more influential than the functionalist
rationale for steroid-boosted law enforcement.
The deviance model assumes that steroid use already indicates a
character defect in the drug-taker. This viewpoint was applied to
military doping in December 2004 when the executive director of the
Australian Defence Association criticized the functionalist view of
doping soldiers. "The Australian people spend a lot on defence," he
said, "and they want value for their money, and they want a defence
force that is physically fit and mentally capable. If you're using
perception-altering substances or steroids you're hardly likely to
be physically or mentally fit." (14) When Copenhagen's Police
Station No. 1 was hit by a steroid scandal in 2000-2001, the city's
chief of police stated: "Combining strength training with the use of
doping drugs is so sick that it simply doesn't belong on a police
force. It is sad that young, well-built people feel too frail and
weak to serve on the force, so they fill themselves with that kind
of poison and bulk up to the point where they are revolting to look
at." (15)
The deviance argument has also appeared in American commentaries
on steroid-using policemen. In 1987, for example, Dr. Philip
Greenberg, the psychiatrist for the Miami Beach Police Department,
put it as follows: "Any policeman taking something … to build up
muscle tissue would have to be a very confused specimen to begin
with." (16) When the police chief of Boca Raton, Florida, was asked
in 2003 what could cause an officer to use steroids, he replied:
"Stupidity and self-absorption and an egocentric mentality." (17)
Stupidity, self-absorption and an egocentric mentality are
certainly compatible with the racism that a few steroid-using
policemen have demonstrated, and not only in the United States. The
Danish cops who were indicted for steroid possession in 2000 were
also found to be in possession of written materials that included a
plan to castrate accused Muslim rapists. (18)
Postulating a correlation between steroid use and racist
eccentricity goes straight to the heart of our society's unresolved
conflict over the meaning of androgenic drug use. Does the choice to
augment oneself with this illegal drug signal a broader propensity
to embrace unwholesome beliefs or engage in antisocial behaviors?
The current anti-steroid sentiment being promoted by politicians and
many others with media access assumes this is the case. It is,
therefore, striking that when the serial killings of black men by a
white, steroid-using police officer made headlines in 1989, the
authorities who might have done so made no effort to connect these
deadly events with the drugs that may well have played a role in
provoking them.
This case of allegedly steroid-fueled police violence comes from
Texas. Over a period of seven years during the 1980s, a Houston
police officer named Scott Tschirhart shot to death three black men
in circumstances that led to protests and a grand jury
investigation. Cleared by the grand jury, Tschirhart was eventually
fired by Houston's black police chief shortly after the third
killing in 1989. (19)
It was well known to his fellow officers that Tschirhart was a
user of anabolic steroids, and they had watched the drugs transform
him as a bodybuilder and as a policeman. "The bigger he got … the
worse he got about strutting around and bragging," a veteran officer
recalled. "You could really see him changing." (20) But the Houston
Police Department had no policy against steroid use, so no one
intervened until the third fatal shooting provoked the department to
investigate this officer's unusually violent career.
Even the appearance of sequential racial killings by a known
steroid user and reputed bigot did not put the issue of cops and
steroids on the national agenda. Nor did the "60 Minutes" segment
broadcast shortly after Tschirhart's firing ignite any further
interest in the major media that might have put this issue on the
national agenda. In 1985 Dr. Robert Kerr, a notorious provider of
steroids to thousands of elite athletes and other customers, had
testified in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles that he
had written steroid prescriptions for 500 law enforcement personnel
in the Los Angeles area. And nothing happened. (21)
A realistic approach to the use of steroids by police officers
must also be prepared to depart from the deviance model for the
purpose of recognizing those cases where it becomes difficult or
impossible to distinguish between therapy and enhancement. For
example, a policeman's use of steroids can have a medical rationale.
A model Ohio county deputy and Gulf War Marine Corps veteran
convicted of steroid possession in 2003 said he had imported the
drugs from Yugoslavia as an effective therapy for his chronic
fatigue syndrome. "I never wanted to look like Arnold," he said. "I
was tired of being tired. I wanted to feel better." (22)
How can we explain our society's current steroid policy, which
treats the drug use of a baseball player as more reprehensible than
that of a police officer?
First, there is the importance of image. Athletes who double as
entertainers do not benefit from the halo effect that wraps public
safety personnel in a presumption of innocence, regardless of
whether this aura is firmly rooted in reality. We are accustomed to
the idea of the police confiscating steroids, not injecting or
ingesting them.
Second, there is the matter of logistics. Subjecting America's
half million police officers to systematic steroid screening would
impose huge additional costs on city governments that already face
chronic deficits. Similar budgetary considerations have drastically
limited the drug testing of the nation's school children, despite
the court decisions that have legalized such procedures. Forcing a
miniscule number of elite athletes to serve as our society's
pharmacological virgins is a far more practical way to pledge
allegiance to the illusion of a "drug-free" society.
Finally, there is our society's profoundly ambivalent attitude
toward male hormone drugs that produce tangible benefits. The new
social acceptability of bodybuilding, embracing its worship of
muscularity and its unabashed ethos of self-improvement, represents
an unmistakable, if camouflaged, acceptance of synthetic
testosterone drugs and their desired effects, ranging from
sculptured torsos to sexual self-confidence. In a similar vein,
significant numbers of sports fans already accept athletic doping
drugs as acceptable enhancements that make possible the performances
they want to see. Finally, popular hormone-based "anti-aging"
therapies employ the same drugs that could put a steroid-using
policeman in prison.
The problem for those monitoring police forces for steroid abuse
is that some steroid users will not display obviously disordered
behaviors. In the absence of systematic drug testing, the most
promising policy would be to investigate every case of
hyper-aggressive behavior by police officers and employ targeted
drug testing in such cases. Above all, officials must keep an eagle
eye on those members of the force who find special fulfillment in
competitive bodybuilding, including those bodybuilding competitions
that are sponsored by police departments. (23) As police authorities
in Berlin found out in 2002, it is likely that a disproportionate
number of these people should not be entrusted with power and a gun.
(24)
(11) Interview with a Danish physician with
anti-doping experience, Odense, Denmark, January 14, 2005.
(12) R.T. Dawson, "Drugs in sport – the role of
the physician," Journal of Endocrinology 170 (2001): 57.
(13) Jon Ungoed-Thomas, "Police taking steroids to
counter thugs," The Sunday Times (December 6, 1998).
(14) Brendan Nicholson, "Defence force strikes
legal hitch on drug tests," The Age [Melbourne] (December 24,
2004).
(15) "Politidoping: Sigtede betjente bliver i
tjeneste," Jyllands-Posten [Denmark] (November 24, 2000).
(16) Angie Cannon, "Steroid-Using Police Causing
Brutality Fears," Miami Herald (May 18, 1987).
(17) Pamela Perez, "Steroid cases worry Boca
police," Palm Beach Post (July 15, 2003).
(18) "Fem betjente sigtet," Jyllands-Posten
(December 23, 2000).
(19) "Researchers say police steroid use a
dangerous trend," Houston Post (November 18, 1989).
(20) "Officer more aggressive since steroids,
colleagues say," Houston Post (November 17, 1989).
(21) Mark Wangrin, "Steroid use by law officers
raises fears," Austin American-Statesman (November 5, 1989).
(22) Stephen Hudak, "Steroids: a threat to police
officers," Cleveland Plain Dealer (July 25, 2003).
(23) For example, the 1st Annual
Nation's Capitol Police and Fire Bodybuilding Championships were
held on June 7, 2003, at Bowie State University in Bowie, Maryland.
See
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