Jill Atwood, of the ABC 4 News affiliate in Salt Lake City, got caught up in the steroid hysteria at the recent “Anti-steroid National Assembly Tour” at Alta High School in Sandy, Utah on Monday (”High school steroid use on the rise,” April 7).
A local high school football coach calls it an epidemic. He’s talking about illegal steroid use, and experts say is as dangerous, unpredictable, and life threatening as meth use.
The “experts” claiming steroids are as dangerous and deadly as methamphetamines were uncited. The high school coach is Les Hamilton who told his high school student athletes that steroids cause “death, pain and emotional damage.”
The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency and the Taylor Hooton Foundation continue to fund steroid education efforts in high schools around the country. The latest steroid public service announcement was made for the benefit of students at Alta High School in Sandy, Utah (”Students get steroid warning,” April 7).
“Steroids are an illegal drug and they can cause you death, pain and emotional damage — it all comes down to choosing right from wrong and being strong enough to encourage those around you to do the right thing,” said Les Hamilton, Alta High’s head football coach.
Coach Hamilton should compare notes with Coach Chris Connolly of Dolgeville High School in New York to maximize the effectiveness of their respective steroid education programs.
I would expect that most journalists would have a basic understanding of anabolic steroids given that the topic has been a major news story for several years now. But journalists still fail to perform their “steroid fact checking” when writing stories on the topic. The Toledo Blade Newspaper out of Ohio published a story about a steroid bust. The only problem with the story was that the man was not busted for anabolic steroids.
Authorities searched the bar in January and found steroids and syringes in a filing cabinet.
The items found were listed as a blister pack containing nine tablets of Clenbuterol, a bottle with liquid Clenbuterol, several vials of the human growth hormone Jintropin, and a bag of syringes and more human growth hormone. Clenbuterol is a steroid used in meat production that’s banned in the United States.
Clenbuterol is not a steroid and neither is human growth hormone. A substance does not automatically become an anabolic steroid simply because it is used in sports or bodybuilding for performance enhancing purposes. I’m not sure why so many people are committed to remaining blissfully ignorant about steroids. Why the resistance to steroid education?
Catching high school athletes who used anabolic steroids was apparently never the primary goal of the Texas steroid testing program. According to a published report, state legislators say the main goal of the $3 million per year investment was to serve as a strong deterrent.
Linn Goldberg, a national drug-testing expert and the head of the division of health promotion and sports medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, said “drug testing, as yet, is not a deterrent to use. There’s no evidence that it is.”
He called the Texas steroids program “a knee-jerk reflex so they can say they’re doing something.”
His Oregon Health and Science University research team recently completed a study that arrived at these conclusions. (See Goldberg, L., et al. (2007) Outcomes of a Prospective Trial of Student-Athlete Drug Testing: The Student Athlete Testing Using Random Notification (SATURN) Study. Journal of Adolescent Health, 41(5):421-429.)
Goldberg has been an outspoken opponent of steroid testing for some time now and has mounted a campaign against steroid testing in schools:
The big thing that people say is you got to give kids a reason not to use drugs, and drug testing is a reason… That’s not what we found. You can look at testing as a way to catch an early addiction, but as a deterrent, which this study was looking at, we didn’t find any evidence that testing was a deterrent.
Diane Elliot, M.D., co-investigator and doping control officer with United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) backs up Goldberg and takes direct aim at the trendy high school steroid testing programs:
This was a state-of-the-art collection and testing program that exceeded those of typical school testing programs. If this did not show significant deterrent effects, less-sophisticated programs are not likely to be more successful.
Linn Goldberg explains to the New York Times that steroid testing doesn’t work as a deterrent because so many people test positive:
If drug testing was so great, if it was so wonderful, we wouldn’t have anybody test positive… People would be scared of testing positive and being thrown out; you have a lot of people who test positive.
Linn Goldberg, in same New York Times interview, explains that steroid testing doesn’t work when no one tests positive either:
They had a ton of drug users; they’re just not catching them. They’re happy as can be that they think they’ve got just a wonderful program. In reality, kids are using just as many drugs and the administrators are walking around in their dream world.
So, if steroid testing catches a lot of high school steroid users, it is not an effective deterrent. And if it catches few steroids users, it is still not an effective deterrent. According to Goldberg, steroid testing does not work regardless of the outcome.
What really bothers Linn Goldberg is that if all the federal and state funds are squandered on steroid testing, then there won’t be any money left to fund steroid education programs (like maybe his ATLAS and ATHENA steroid education programs that have been the primary beneficiary of federal funds earmarked for ’steroid education’ after the passage of the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004!)
Here’s what I see is the big problem: If you put in drug testing and you think it works, then you’re not going to put anything else in. You’re not going to care about anything else because you probably feel, ‘We’ve taken care of it.’
The truth comes out. Things are not always what they seem. Linn Goldberg has a clear conflict of interest since federal and state funds for “steroid education” and “steroid testing” are limited and tend to compete against each other.
I don’t understand why journalists are not more critical of Dr. Goldberg, his conflict of interest, the appearance of bias, and history of pandering for federals funds for his “steroid education” programs.
I tend to agree with Linn Goldberg’s assessment of state steroid testing programs. But I am also critical of steroid education programs too.
The New York Times wonders if the “focus on testing at the high school level is a deterrent or a burgeoning cottage industry.” The NY Times then concludes we should just give money to everyone and hope something works:
What the study makes clear is that there is a need for education and detection. This is not an either/or proposition.
The Mitchell Report acknowledged that current steroid education programs used by Major League Baseball that focus on the dangerous side effects of anabolic steroids are generally ineffective:
[T]hese health risks… generally will not deter a player from using these substances. This is because players who use or are considering using performance enhancing substances do not consider them dangerous if used properly. This view is reinforced when players see that other players who they know are using performance enhancing substances arc not experiencing the adverse health effects described in the educational materials.
With the widespread use of steroids by baseball players and the lack of significant negative side effects, it is not surprising that scare tactics using overstated and exaggerated dangers of steroids are unsuccessful at steroid prevention in baseball.
But Senator Mitchell’s proposed solution to restore credibility to steroid education programs seems like a disaster. The Mitchell Report proposes offering “education on alternative methods to achieve the same results.”
[W]hile it is important to educate players about the dangers of performance enhancing substances, it is just as important to educate them on how to achieve the same results through proper training, nutrition, and supplements that are legal and safe.
So, all baseball players need is a creative chemist who can discover or synthesize a legal supplement [that complies with Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA)] with steroid-like effects. This legal supplement will be considered safe since newly introduced supplements are assumed to be safe under DSHEA unless proven otherwise by the FDA.
And the baseball player will have a legal and safe supplement to use.
This is the recommendation of the Mitchell Report?
But isn’t that what started the whole steroids in baseball scandal? THG redux.
