The Drug Enforcement Agency in the US has nailed a very large number of steroid manufacturers and distributors and, perhaps more importantly, the client lists of the various manufacturers and distributors. ABC reported that the DEA busted 56 labs confiscated 11 million doses and put their hands on $6.5 million in cash.
The client lists don’t have the names of high performance athletes: The buyers have been high school kids, college students and average folks who have been buying the products to enhance their athletic prowess.
Naturally, bootleg pharmaceutical labs looks upon things like sanitation and product safety as distant, abstract concepts. By their nature, steroids and Human Growth Hormone are injectable medications, meaning you have to fill a syringe with them and jamb them into your muscle mass to take the product. If the product is made in a household garage, as apparently many were, you might as well shoot a mix of rat poison, car wax and lawnmower gas into your butt cheek.
Quoting from the ABC posting,
The father of a teen who used steroids says it was the allure of a greater athletic prowess caused his son to start taking the drugs after a coach told him he needed to get bigger and stronger to excel at baseball.
Don Hooton says his son Taylor, only 17 years old at the time, began using illegal steroids because of a combination of factors, from the desire to emulate the successes of professional athletes, to "peer pressure, the desire to win, mom and dad pushing the kids, in a good way, but to make a starting line-up, to try to earn that scholarship," Hooton explained.
Don Hooton’s son, Taylor, hung himself in 2004.
Steroids have a number of side effects, aside from heart damage and liver damage. There are three that I have seen first-hand. First, a serious case of industrial acne. Second, a hair-trigger temper or raging. Third, either a complete loss of sex drive, or a wild increase in sex drive, to the point of the crack of dawn not being safe in the same room with the user.
Of course, there is the remarkable increase in muscle mass, stamina and strength. In the 70’s many high school football players took steroids, for the same reasons they do today: Athletic success.
That’s the part that puzzles me. Regardless of the sport, an athlete’s career is essentially over by 30. The knees, or hips give up. The eyes or the reflexes go, or the shoulder and elbows break down, depending on the sport. Then there are always the younger, quicker, stronger ones coming up fast, looking to knock the veterans off the pedestal.
Stick and ball sports at the highest level pay very well, but for every Wayne Gretzky or Martina Hingis grade superstars, there are hundreds of thousands of never-made-its. The law of averages are against the Taylor Hootons’ of this world who still have the dreams of making it big. Dreams so big they’re willing to risk everything to obtain it.
Of the high school superstars I went to school with, not one of the squad of 30 made it to college or university football, let alone the CFL. The team was City Champions for two years and renown as the toughest team going, but none of them, including those who mysteriously gained 80 pounds of solid muscle over the summer, went any further than high school football.
With our ages now in the 50’s, plus or minus, how many have serious medical issues from a season or two of steroid use in the 70’s? Nobody knows for sure, but the likelihood is probably high.
So, why shoot your butt full of crap for the one in a hundred thousand shot that you might, possibly, if the planets line up right, get on a college baseball team? Are we so sports-smitten that our only acceptable heroes are 18-year olds hitting a baseball over a fence, or throwing a football to someone else?
Assuming we’re that shallow as a society, what do we do with a 25 year old who has his knees blow out after a couple of seasons of pro ball? They have no job skills, unless you count hitting other large men as a job skill. Some have been passed through class after class in high school and college for the ‘good of the team’, to the point that the individual has no actual identity or talents except as a ‘star athlete’.
Socialization skills consist of being part of a group. Work skills are watching scouting films, memorizing plays and hanging out with the rest of the team. Which would leave our mythical 25 year old athlete with the shot knees as a candidate for what job? Warehouse worker? Not with ruined knees you don’t. Truck driver? With little numerical literacy, how does the ex ball player add up the truck manifest and calculate mileage? Telephone sales? Perhaps, if they’re verbally persuasive and have at least some semblance of common courtesy, which is not a requirement to be a good football player.
Our stress on ‘star athlete’ as the answer to ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ is creating a strata of society who can’t actually do anything constructive for society. There is no fallback position, so we discard them, as failed, soiled and just not good enough to make it in the big leagues.
Which brings us back to the steroid busts. So many people, so determined to become a star athlete that they’re willing to poison themselves for a one in a hundred thousand chance to maybe make it in a job that will discard you like a used tissue, for the adoration of fans who only want winners and who don’t give a damn if you live or die, for a that one chance to have your career end and you’re faced with no job, no skills and no prospects.
We are that shallow. We are that stupid. The DEA steroid bust proves it.
RoadDave 