This Is Your Sport, on Dope

State Sen. Don Perata's bill on drug testing for pro athletes isn't nearly tough enough on doped-up athletes or their enablers

A A A Comments By Matt Smith Wednesday, Aug 7 2002

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The next generation of bioengineered doping products hints at even more spectacular side effects: One British experimental compound, dubbed "mechano-growth factor," increased muscle mass by 60 percent in mice -- with no exercise.

Barry Bonds, Angels outfielder Garret Anderson, and their apologists say that drug testing is an invasion of privacy. And I'm sure there are some readers who will confuse the issue of performance-enhancing drug use with recreational drugs. The two couldn't be more different.

Scott Musgrove

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An athlete who pulls down a multimillion-dollar salary based on public adulation earned via performance-enhancing drugs is a criminal fraud as surely as any revenue-inflating Enron executive. A sports executive who gives lip service to the idea of chemical-free competition, then looks away as his athletes juice, is selling the purest corporate flimflam.

It's time to admit that doping is ubiquitous, and that the forces propelling drug use are nearly irresistible. State legislators should pass Perata's bill -- and then follow it with legislation that truly holds athletes, trainers, owners, and promoters criminally and civilly liable for drug use in sport. This means independent, random, year-round testing, and support from sports organizations and drug manufacturers for a robust scientific effort to keep up with drug cheats. Taking the dope out of sport may require new criminal statutes; it will certainly require increased enforcement.

Anything less, and professional sports will remain a fraud.

In an e-mail, Sen. Perata told me he's sponsoring his anti-drug bill because pro baseball's "lack of decisive action against steroid proliferation effectively encourages impressionable young ballplayers to use these drugs to be like the pros."

Perata says his bill will send kids a message about drugs. The measure's deeper message -- which says that adults address uncomfortable problems with illusion rather than solutions -- is a lesson that children could do without.

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