Student steroid tests get ‘F,’ say some experts

Brian Alexander • E-mail

With the start of the new school year, thousands of high school student-athletes will face a trial that has nothing to do with wind sprints, push-ups, or drills honing their skills. They will be urinating into cups, so they can be tested for steroids, just like the pros.

This month, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into a law an expansion of the state’s existing testing program for steroids and stimulants, so called “performance-enhancing drugs,” part of a nationwide trend to insure boys and girls are PED-free.

The law was not controversial; it unanimously passed the state’s legislature. Who would vote no? After all, goes the conventional wisdom, steroids kill, and lots of kids are using them because they want bigger muscles, faster times, more power, just like their pro sports idols. Testing will keep them pure.

But the conventional wisdom might be wrong.

Steroid use in schools may not be nearly as prevalent as has been assumed, say some experts who note that the dangers of doping have been hyped partly by politicians, partly by well-meaning but misguided parents, and partly by a growing drug testing industry. They also say testing kids for PEDs will not only prove ineffective, but counterproductive and wasteful.

At the moment, three states, New Jersey, Texas and Illinois, have active statewide mandated steroids testing. Florida’s program has been suspended due to a budget crunch but officials there hope to restart it. Some local districts and individual schools around the country also test, and there are calls for testing in many jurisdictions.

But the move to test, said Dr. Norm Fost, a University of Wisconsin pediatrician and bioethicist, is based on “mass hysteria and phenomenal hyperbole.”

“This is just like ‘Reefer Madness,’” he said, likening the push to the Depression-era anti-marijuana film which depicted high school students tuned into murderous lunatics.

Fost has been a long-time — if lonely — skeptic of anti-PED policies. But he has some allies in his opposition to school-based testing programs as they are currently constituted.

High costs, low impact
University of Michigan researcher Lloyd Johnston, who conducts an ongoing survey of teenage risk taking for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, believes testing is “very likely going to be a very expensive set of interventions with minimal impact.”

Hard numbers reported by states that test seem to bear that out:

• In Texas, for the entire period of testing so far (February 2008 through May of 2009), 45,193 students have urinated into cups. Nineteen have come up positive. The cost of the program over the two years was $3 million, or $157,894 per positive test.
• In Florida, the state spent $100,000 testing about 600 athletes during the 2007-2008 year and found one positive.
• New Jersey has spent $100,000 per year over nearly three years, testing 500 students per year. So far there have been two positives.
• During the 2008-2009 school year, Illinois spent $150,000 testing 684 students. Zero tested positive for unauthorized substances.

Dr. Linn Goldberg, an Oregon Health Sciences University physician and doping expert who studies drug use among young people, says he has found that testing not only has little impact as a deterrent, but that it may even backfire.

In 2007, Goldberg co-authored a study showing that “overall, drug testing was accompanied by an increase in some risk factors for future substance use.”

Goldberg surmises that testing gives the impression lots of kids are using. Students then look around, see that their peers are healthy, and conclude that perhaps drug use is not as dangerous as they've been told. 

Rather than testing, Goldberg said, “schools should do what they do best, and that’s educate.”

But such dissenting voices have been smothered amid the cacophony of Congressional hearings on steroid use in professional baseball, Tour de France scandals, statements from anti-doping agencies and testing companies warning of looming public health threats to children.

Which states test student athletes? High school athletes in the following states are tested each year for performance enhancing drugs: — New Jersey — Texas — Illinois Florida has a program that has been suspended due to a budget crunch but officials there hope to restart it. Some local districts and individual schools around the country also test.

“I sat next to the governor of Texas before they started drug testing and I told him it was nuts,” Goldberg recalled. “It just makes no sense.”

The process Illinois followed was typical. Kurt Gibson, the assistant executive director of the Illinois High School Association, the state’s scholastic sports authority, says a task force it created sent materials about PEDs to schools and coaches and asked if there was a problem.

“The feedback was ‘Yes, there is,’” recalled Gibson. That answer was based on anecdotal comments, said Gibson, who favors testing for its supposed deterrent effect. Coaches asked their athletes if they knew of kids taking PEDs. “Those kids said ‘Yeah,’” Gibson explained, often pointing the finger at rival teams. “It was lots of stuff like ‘the kids in the other town are doing stuff.’”

Pete Tunnicliffe, the father of Matt, a senior cross country and track athlete at Prairie Ridge High School in Crystal Lake, Ill., said he’s “glad the state is taking action to help protect our children.”

After all, he said, everyone has read the headlines about professional baseball. “We do believe it filters down.”

Neither he nor his son are aware of any student athletes using performance-enhancing drugs, Tunnicliffe said, “but we follow the logic after what‘s happened at the professional level.”

Slideshow   Baseball's steroid scandal See some of the key players and those implicated in steroid use. more photos

Far less usage than previously thought
That logic leads to inflated estimates of school-age users, some say. When proponents of testing in Texas enlisted the help of former Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus, the Hall of Famer released a statement saying “recent reports estimate that steroid use among high school students is gripping as many as one-in-10 students, including both young men and women.”

While accurate numbers are difficult to obtain because it’s illegal to possess the drugs without a prescription, no credible research study has ever shown anything close to a one-in-10 usage rate. The most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the national median percentage of high school boys and girls who had ever in their lives used a steroid drug illicitly is 3.9.

Recent usage is far lower. The 2008 numbers for Johnston’s ongoing study showed that the percentage of students who used an illicit steroid in the last 30 days was just 0.6 percent. That is just slightly more than the percentage, 0.4, who had used heroin. Meanwhile, in the last 30 days, 12.5 percent had smoked marijuana, 14.9 percent had been drunk, and 12.6 percent had smoked cigarettes.

Rather than a growing problem, Johnston said, steroid use has been falling off.

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