Marvin Miller, the 91-year-old co-founder of the Major League Baseball Players Association, agreed to speak to ESPN’s Peter Gammons on Tuesday. The interview can be found at espn.com.
In the interview, Miller makes some strong comments about the mainstream media-U.S. government steroids witch-hunt. Since both institutions are working together to destroy players’ lives, Miller thought it timely to speak out. His comments are at the bottom of this item.
In the meantime, in the summer of 2008, I wrote the following for Grassroots News:
By Scott Taylor
Sports Editor
As Roger Clemens continues to defend himself against allegations of steroid and Human Growth Hormone use and as the mainstream media mob continues to drone on about “Drug cheats,” and “Juicers,” Grassroots News publisher Arnold Asham asked the following rhetorical questions the other day.
“What’s wrong with professional athletes using steroids? And who cares if they do?”
The questions are brilliant in their simplicity and I must admit, I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to come up with an honest, moral and ethical answer to either query.
Let’s start with Question 2: “Who cares if they do?” Evidently nobody. You can’t buy a decent Detroit Tigers ticket (for Grapefruit League or the regular-season schedule) even though three Tigers’ stars — Gary Sheffield, Magglio Ordonez and Ivan Rodriguez — have been linked to steroid use.
Now, on to Question 1: “What’s wrong with professional athletes using steroids?” Let me tell you, I’ve heard all the arguments:
“Steroids are bad for you.”
“Using performance enhancing drugs is cheating.”
“It’s not a level playing field if you use steroids.”
OK, but why? No one, not even the king of drug cops, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s former chair Dick Pound has ever been able to answer that question. Pound and his followers have created the bad rap, but they’ve never once given a clear indication as to why steroids are bad.
In November of 2005 in the publication “Virtual Mentor,” the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, Dr. Norman Fost, director of the Program in Medical Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, wrote an article entitled “Steroid Hysteria: Unpacking the Claims.”
He answered the questions Pound and the mainstream media horde have never answered. Although, I would doubt neither Pound nor the mainstream media would have appreciated or agreed with his answers.
“The long campaign to demonize and prohibit the use of anabolic steroids in sports—in the press, by the United States Congress, and by the offices of the leaders of sports—has been so strident and one-sided that a literate person would have little reason to suspect there is another side to the story,” Dr. Fost wrote. “But it is the business of ethics to present justifications for actions, and the claims that have been made for prohibiting the use of anabolic steroids by competent adults appear to be incoherent, disingenuous, hypocritical, and based on bad facts.”
The worst excuse is the one that suggests that because of steroids the playing field is not level and competition is unfair. That would be true, one supposes, if performance-enhancing drugs were not easily available and if big league athletes didn’t make enough money to pay for them. And these are the same big league athletes who often legal take cortisone shots to play while injured, eat legal painkillers “like Skittles” as Clemens claimed, and make regular use of the legal muscle-building supplement, Creatine.
Fact: There is no level playing field. How many people were given LeBron James’s physical gifts? Genetics guarantees that at birth, the playing field is not level.
However, according to Fost, “Competition can be unfair if there is unequal access to such enhancements, but equal access can be achieved more predictably by deregulation than by prohibition. It is hypocritical for leaders in Major League Baseball to trumpet their concern about fair competition in a league that allows one team (the Yankees) to have a payroll three times larger than most of its competitors.”
For years, we’ve heard the argument that taking steroids causes acne on the back, a large, square forehead, loss of hair, shrinking of testicles and, eventually, an early death. As an ethicist, those claims confuse Fost.
“Good ethics starts with good facts, and the claims on this point are, to understate the case, seriously overstated,” he wrote. “Articles abound in the mass media on the life-threatening risks of anabolic steroids: cancer, heart disease, stroke, and so on. What is missing are peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals to support the claims.”
Fost loves to site the case of former Oakland Raiders linebacker Lyle Alzado. According to Fost: “So Lyle Alzado, the NFL all-star, is presented on the front page of the New York Times and the cover of Sports Illustrated because of an alleged steroid-related brain tumor. What is missing is a single article, or evidence, or even a quote from any authority on the topic to support any connection between steroids and Alzado’s tumor.”
Another argument that appears to make Fost laugh in disgust is the one that suggests anabolics are unnatural and “undermine the essence of sport.”
“This claim seems predicated on the notion that there is some essence of sport. Oh, spare me,” Fost says. “Sports are games, invented by humans, with arbitrary rules that are constantly changing. Since the beginning of recorded history, athletes have used an infinite variety of unnatural assists to enhance performance, from springy shoes to greasy swimsuits, bamboo poles to better bats, and endless chemicals from carb-filled diets to Gatorade drinks. Why is there not a ban on training in high altitudes, or sleeping in a hypobaric chamber, for the purpose of raising hemoglobin to unnatural levels?”
Here’s another one that gives our University of Wisconsin ethicist indigestion: “Steroids undermine the integrity of sports records.”
“Of all the proposed punishments for Rafael Palmeiro, the Baltimore Orioles slugger who was reported to have tested positive for steroids, the favorite seemed to be to abolish his home run records,” Fost recalled. “The implicit concern is that Babe Ruth or Roger Maris is being unfairly deprived of his place in history. But steroids are only one of many reasons why the old records keep falling. The fences are shorter, the pitching mound is lower, the ball is livelier, the strike zone keeps changing, and so on. The left field fence in Jacobs Field is more than 100 feet closer than it was in (Cleveland’s) Municipal Stadium when it opened in the 1930s, so let’s have some asterisks for home runs at The Jake and every other stadium with shortened fences.”
Everyone will agree that kids shouldn’t use steroids. Kids shouldn’t use any drugs at all, frankly.
And don’t forget, scientific study provides clear proof that tobacco and beverage alcohol are much worse for you – athlete or non-athlete – than steroids will ever be. Just ask former NHL all-star defenceman Rob Ramage who is going to jail for four years because he drank too much and drove his car.
Strange but hypocritically true: Beverage alcohol is not only legal, our provincial government advertises it and encourages its use.
We live in a drug-centric society. All you have to do is watch the nightly news shows in the United States and you will see one drug advertisement after another. There is now a drug to get it up, take it down, wake up in the morning, go to sleep at night. There are drugs for acid reflux (burping), for restless leg syndrome (whatever) and too much cholesterol (change your diet). Our society now exists on drugs.
But as Dr. Fost maintains, the media has decided that the use of anabolic steroids in sport should be illegal. Trouble is, no one has made it very clear as to why. And sadly, that hasn’t happened yet.
Personally, I don’t doubt steroids should be outlawed in sport. I’m not sure our publisher, Mr. Asham, would argue that steroids shouldn’t be outlawed. It’s just that we’d both like someone to give us a good reason why.
On Wednesday Jerry Crasnick wrote the following at espn.com. These comments were taking from a 40-minute interview with Marvin Miller conducted by Peter Gammons:
Crasnick set this up by writing: “Miller took several other hard-line and potentially unpopular stands during a 40-minute interview with ESPN.com Tuesday. Among his other observations:”
• On the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball: “I have a personal belief that there’s no such thing as a magic pill or magic injection. I don’t know that there’s any scientific evidence that there’s a performance-enhancing drug. Players take it because they think it does. That’s a far cry from saying that it does. Where is the evidence that requires testing?”
• On the argument that steroids should be eliminated from the game because of health concerns: “Not one but two surgeons general have said that tobacco use is the worst cause of death in the United States that can be prevented — that we lose 400,000 people a year to tobacco-related incidents and over time it runs into the millions. Yet not only do we not outlaw tobacco, but the U.S. Congress keeps giving subsidies to the tobacco industry and everybody sits back and smiles. On the other hand, there’s not one single documented death from the use of steroids. So that’s a hypocritical lie.”
• On the dangers of taking drug test results as gospel: “Anybody who has read about urine testing for a long time knows that quite a number of false positives come up. You get a false positive and then people are questioned in another context — ‘were you a user?’ They say no. And then you get a news leak — a leak of a leak, as it were — and it turns out that you tested positive. If you said something under oath, you could go to jail and still be an innocent person.”
• On why the union didn’t necessarily have to bend to the wishes of membership and agree to random drug testing. “I have no doubt that was a factor in the union agreeing to it. But leadership can’t just take a poll on what membership wants. You also have to judge whether this is in the best interests of the people you represent. If the entire membership voted unanimously to disband, would you do it?”
• On the media’s role in perpetuating steroid use by referring to the drugs as “performance enhancers”: “A kid who would love to be a professional athlete reads the sports pages or watches ESPN and is told over and over again, ‘These are performance enhancing drugs. They will make you a Barry Bonds or an A-Rod or a Roger Clemens,’ The media, without evidence, keep telling young people all over the country, ‘All you have to do to be a famous athlete with lots of money is take steroids.’ The media are the greatest merchants of encouraging this that I’ve ever seen.”
Miller also criticized the Justice Department for engaging in “union-busting tactics” by using the confidentiality provision in the drug testing to get information from players, and said many of the “experts” who advocate for greater testing in sports have an inherent conflict because they run labs and stand to profit.
“It’s a witch hunt in baseball, for sure, but it also extends to cycling and the Olympics,” Miller said. “And the victims are the athletes. They’re obviously the ones being hunted down here.”
There are a lot of people who write the truth and know the truth. The trouble is, the mainstream media — a large portion of whom are smokers and drinkers — believe that steroids are bad and are perpetuating what Miller calls “a hypocritical lie.”
Again, the biggest problem we face in sports is not steroid use but an ignorant mainstream media reporting falsehoods and perpetuating lies.
