While I promised to talk about the neurochemistry of SSRIs in this post (and how they often work as performance-enhancing drugs), I’ve decided to save that for the moment and instead revisit another of the main arguments in the war against steroids: the question of cheating.
If you believe the hype then steroids hurt sport by conferring an unfair advantage on the athletes who take them. The idea is that these substances tilt the playing field and that this tilted playing field ruins the integrity of the game—but was that integrity ever there to begin with?
From Stone Age hunters tripping on psychedelics to Roman gladiators drunk on herbal stimulants to distance runners cooking up cocktails of strychnine and brandy (which helped American Tom Hicks win the 1904 Olympic marathon), the history of sport is the history of drugs in sport. No matter how much we want to believe otherwise, clean and sober has rarely been a requirement for our athletic pastimes. Which is to say, claiming the integrity of the game is based on players being drug-free is claiming no integrity for the game.
Take baseball: America’s pastime has been hooked on speed since the 1940s—almost forty years before steroids became a problem. When Jim Bouton published Ball Four in 1970, chronicling the story of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots, pro-sports turned on him. Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to get him to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true, sportswriters called him a “Benedict Arnold,” and to this day he is not invited back to Yankee Stadium for Old-Timer’s Day. What was the dread secret that Bouton revealed?
Amphetamines—and their significant abuse in the sport.
There’s a scene in the book in which pitcher John O’Donoghue receives his season’s supply of “pep pills”—a whopping 500 hundred in all—about which Boulton shrugs and says, “They ought to last a month.” Not much has changed. According to a 2005 USA Today report, 87.2 percent of the players surveyed said amphetamine use is rampant in baseball and 35.3 percent said as many as 50 percent of all players are using. And the reason US army gives soldiers in Iraq Adderall for the same reason outfielders have long taken “greenies”—amphetamines are fantastic performance enhancers: they increase pain tolerance, concentration, muscle reaction time, while lowering fatigue.
And baseball doesn’t hold a candle to football. Widespread drug abuse arrived in the NFL in the mid-sixties, twenty years later, things had gotten so bad that football writer Paul “Dr. Z.” Zimmermann noted: “the offense of the 80s is now cocaine possession.” In June of 1982, Don Reese, who played for both Miami and New Orleans, told Sports Illustrated: “Cocaine can be found in quantity in the NFL. It’s pushed on players, often from the edge of the practice field. It’s pushed by players. Prominent players. Just as it controlled me, it now controls and corrupts the game…”
And while the use of such uppers are illegal in sport, they’re not considered performance-enhancing substances. This is just plain fiction. To claim that the same record books threatened by steroids are immune to the effects of so-called “recreation drugs” is pure hypocrisy. Then again, this is professional sports we’re talking about—so pure hypocrisy seems to be par for the course.
