High Schools Take on Doping with No Consensus on Strategy
By Jere Longman
OPELOUSAS, La.--The sheriff of St. Landry Parish announced in July that an undercover investigation of area gyms had produced the largest anabolic steroid bust ever in this rural Cajun county.
In an investigation that has identified about 100 suspected steroid users and 15 dealers in the county, 10 people have been arrested, including two former high school football players, the sheriff said. He added that of those 100 suspected users, as many as 20 were high school athletes. That number stunned educators and law enforcement officials who had considered performance-enhancing drugs to be more of a big-city problem.
"I think there's more steroid use, after talking to my investigators, in sports activities than originally thought," said Bobby J. Guidroz, the sheriff of St. Landry Parish, population 90,000, about two hours west-northwest of New Orleans.
The use of muscle-building steroids by teenagers is of particular concern because it can prematurely close growth plates, doctors say. But throughout the country, efforts to deter performance-enhancing drug use among high school athletes have had indeterminate success, leaving doping experts and school officials wondering how best to tackle a problem that is not always readily apparent.
Drug testing is expensive, scattered and full of loopholes. Some believe that education is a better preventive measure than testing, but experts question methods frequently used to inform athletes about the health hazards and ethical considerations of doping.
In Cajun country and elsewhere, law enforcement officers and antidoping experts say, the problem can be exacerbated by coaches and parents who allow or even encourage their children to use steroids in hopes of building championship seasons and winning college scholarships.
Sheriff Guidroz said his investigators received tips--never confirmed--that one coach in St. Landry Parish and another coach who had left the county encouraged athletes to use steroids. A former strength and conditioning coach for the girls' basketball team in Oregon City, Ore., was fired in May as part of an ongoing federal investigation into whether he sold steroids to a police officer in Canby, Ore. No charges have been filed.
Some studies indicate that the use of anabolic steroids is in decline in high schools. A survey by the University of Michigan revealed that 2.2 percent of the nation's 12th graders admitted in 2007 that they had used steroids at least once, down from 4 percent in 2002. And school districts report more urgent problems with alcohol and recreational drugs like marijuana. Still, many antidoping experts said they believed the numbers on steroid use were significantly underreported, especially in sports like football that put a premium on strength.
"What I'm getting from school districts and from pediatricians who do annual physicals is they're irate about these kids getting bigger and bigger--10 or 20 pounds heavier, all buffed up--and they really want something done," said Don Catlin, the chief executive of Anti-Doping Research, a nonprofit firm in Southern California.
Charles Yesalis, a retired Penn State professor and an expert on performance-enhancing drugs, said: "We could well be past the point--unless something dramatic happens, like 20 kids dying--of doing anything about this. I'm not even sure people want to take care of the problem, in their heart of hearts."
For decades, high school officials have been "ostriches with their heads in the sand," Yesalis said, trying to convince themselves that a steroid problem does not exist.
"These drugs are readily available, kids can afford them and they work," he added. "The few states that have instituted testing systems have set them up to fail. It's mainly to make coaches and parents feel good. That's too bad. A decent, rigorous level of testing would work better in high school than in college or the pros."
Only three states--New Jersey, Texas and Illinois--have mandatory drug testing of high school athletes. Florida halted its program this year after losing $100,000 in funding from its state legislature because of budget cuts related to the economic downturn. Because the tests are so expensive--they can cost up to $200 or $300 each--states generally do not test a large number of athletes or monitor the same range of performance-enhancing drugs as, say, the Olympics.
"The biggest hurdle is the cost," said Bob Gardner, the chief operating officer of the National Federation of State High School Associations.
Illinois and New Jersey, the first state to begin mandatory testing, in 2006, test athletes only when they reach postseason competition. When athletes know they will be tested, antidoping experts say, a screening becomes more of an I.Q. test than a drug test. Even at the high school level, athletes are sophisticated enough to know when to stop taking a cycle of steroids and how to quickly flush the drugs from their system or mask them, experts say.
New Jersey has reported two positives among 1,000 athletes tested the last two years.
Texas performs random, unannounced testing of athletes, both during the season and out of season. But that system is hardly foolproof, either. Like New Jersey and Illinois, Texas does not test athletes during the summer, when athletes can bulk up illicitly without fear of detection. And its testing system has raised much skepticism. Some 10,000 of Texas' 700,000 high school athletes were screened as part of a $3 million program during the 2007-8 school year, but only two positive tests were reported.
It can be a mistake to conclude that the program is not working because of the paucity of positive results, experts caution. Perhaps the tests served as a deterrent. But more likely, some antidoping researchers believe, there was a flaw in Texas' testing protocol, such as testing too few athletes in sports like football, screening for too few drugs or providing too much advance notice for the tests.
The University Interscholastic League, which governs high school sports in Texas, said there was insufficient data after one year to know whether the program was effective at catching or deterring drug users. Another 30,000 to 40,000 athletes will be tested this school year.
"Something's wrong," said Dr. Gary I. Wadler, a New York University internist and the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency's committee on prohibited substances. Two positive tests in Texas, a state where high school football is hugely popular, and where a border is shared with Mexico, from which many steroids enter the United States, "seems virtually impossible," Wadler said.
Dr. Linn Goldberg, the head of the division of health promotion and sports medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, was the co-author of a study last year in the Journal of Adolescent Health that showed testing did not deter high school athletes from using performance-enhancing drugs. Teenagers can feel immortal in taking risks and challenging authority, Goldberg said. And so few athletes were tested, he said, they knew the chances of being caught were "infinitesimally small."
Instead, Goldberg stresses educational programs that he and associates developed, called Atlas and Athena. But federal funding even for educational programs can be difficult to obtain. For instance, Goldberg said that $15 million had been earmarked for education annually for six years by the 2004 Anabolic Steroid Control Act, yet "not one penny has been put forward."
So Goldberg has partnered with 16 teams in the N.F.L. A two-year, $2.6 million initiative funded by the league will reach 40,000 kids and 1,500 coaches with the Atlas and Athena programs this year, he said. But Goldberg cautioned that some methods frequently used by schools did not work, including the use of pamphlets, adult lectures and scare tactics.
Effective education, he said, involved children encouraging other children to avoid performance-enhancing drugs, and athletes being provided with alternative ways to gain weight and strength through proper nutrition and training techniques.
"You can't believe how much coaches don't know about proper sports nutrition," Goldberg said.
Some experts remain skeptical about the efficacy of education alone. Without effective testing, they say, education is essentially a folly because performance-enhancing drugs are so seductive and effective. "I don't think a simple education program works for hard-core athletes," Catlin of Anti-Doping Research said.
Instead, Catlin proposes for high schools what he has long proposed for Olympic and professional athletes--the creation of so-called biological passports that track chemical markers in athletes over a long period. A successful program would require doctors to track these markers and pass that information into a central data bank, Catlin said.
"You wouldn't use it to take kids to court, but in high school you don't want to take kids to court," Catlin said. "You want to identify them and show that there is another way to go about life."
Here in St. Landry Parish, the six public high schools can test 10 percent of their athletes three times a year for recreational drugs. During those three testing periods, the schools are allowed to screen one athlete for performance-enhancing drugs. "That's not much of a deterrent," said Gardner of the National Federation of State High School Associations.
The cost of wider testing is prohibitive, said Donnie Perron, the athletic director for St. Landry Parish schools, who favors an enhanced education program. So far, the most effective deterrent in the county seems to be the vigilance of coaches.
Tom Andrus, the football coach at St. Edmund's of Eunice, a power among Louisiana's small schools, said that he had suspended two players in the last two years after failed drug screens. One came under suspicion because he frequently appeared irritated, Andrus said, while the other player seemed to bulk up too quickly.
Paul Trosclair, the football coach at Eunice High, a Class 4A power, said that sudden weight gain had also made him suspicious of one of his players two or three years ago. The player failed a drug screen and his mother became defensive, Trosclair said. "She kind of knew what was going on," he said. "I think she might have put her head in the sand."
For reasons of vanity or gaining a quick advantage, high school athletes can turn to steroids, Trosclair said. In particular, he said, coaches should be careful when they tell players to get bigger.
"They feel pressure," Trosclair said. "Coach wants me to get bigger. I want to be in the starting lineup. What's the best way to get there? They go into health clubs and some guy off the street says, 'We can get you bigger, faster.' There you go, you have a problem."
