A bulked-up body of knowledge
    As researchers look more closely at the steroid dosages used by athletes, they are ever closer to determining the risks
    6.10.02   Benedict Carey L.A.Times
Former baseball star Ken Caminiti's recent statement that "at least half" of major league players are using steroids was barely out of his mouth before he retracted it. Too late; by that time the debate was in full swing on radio talk shows, in Internet chat rooms and grocery store lines. Depending on your point of view, athletes who dope themselves are either hard-nosed competitors or big-time cheaters. The drugs either add home runs or merely shorten careers. And steroid use itself is either a harmless form of sports medicine, or a deadly gamble.

In part, the dispute expresses simple personal bias about performance enhancers that are illegal, except to treat disease. Yet experts say it also reflects the controversial, and still incomplete, science of anabolic steroids themselves, the dozens of substances now bought and sold illicitly on the black market. "You have to understand that up until about 10 years ago, many in the medical research community still doubted that these drugs had any effect on muscle," said Dr. Shalender Bhasin, an endocrinologist at Charles Drew University in Los Angeles. "We were studying doses of the drugs that were much lower than what athletes were actually taking."

That has changed. In recent years, researchers have begun to study higher doses of anabolic steroids, and piece together a clearer picture of what they do to the body. Anabolic steroids mimic the action of testosterone, which is produced naturally by male testes and, to a lesser extent, by female adrenal glands. Levels of the hormone first surge in boys after age 8, triggering many of the physical changes that occur during puberty, deepening voice, increase in lean muscle mass, acne and physical growth. By adulthood, a man produces about 50 mg of the crucial hormone a week; a woman, about a tenth of that amount. Men whose bodies produce abnormally low amounts of testosterone, a condition called hypogonadism, often due to chronic disease, such as AIDS, can suffer depression, sexual malaise, fatigue and shrinkage of their gonads. In recent years, doctors have begun treating these patients with anabolic steroids, usually giving them what are called replacement doses, of about 100mg a week.

Weightlifters & other athletes in search of an edge may take anywhere from 250 mg to more than 3,000 mg a week, and most are delighted with the change in their physique, trainers say. For example, combining doses of 600 mg a week with regular workouts increases muscle size by about 8%, on average, and strength by 10% to 15%, in just a couple of months, according to recent research by Bhasin. "For a competitive athlete, that is a huge gain," he said. Bhasin has also demonstrated that, as a rule, the higher the steroid dose, the bigger & stronger the athlete becomes.

There is a physical cost to steroid use, however, and this is where the scientific debate begins.
In adolescents, doctors all agree that the drugs are dangerous. Not only can doses of steroids cause very visible problems, hair loss, severe acne, but they often interfere with the body's own hormone-driven development. In effect, taking steroids tricks an adolescent body into thinking it's older, doctors say. The result: stunted growth. The rate of steroid use at high schools increased about 50% in the 1990s, with about 3% of students reporting they'd used the drugs in 1999, compared with 2% in 1991, government statistics show. "Some of these guys are stacking several steroids, and mixing them with ephedrine & all sorts of other things," said UCLA sports medicine professor Dr. Gary Green. "There really is no safe level of use, as far as I'm concerned."

When it comes to adults, however, the science is cloudier and medical opinions vary. Doses of 1,000 mg a week or higher are considered risky; yet those in the 500 mg range may not be, some doctors say. "I'm not convinced the drugs are all that dangerous," said Dr. Paul D. Thompson, a cardiologist at Hartford (Conn.) Hospital, who has studied steroid use in older men & athletes. "I'm willing to be wrong on this. But I think we need to be very careful speculating about serious effects. We just don't have the data yet."

Dr. Nick Evans, an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles who has studied steroid use, agrees. In a 1997 survey of 100 experienced weightlifters, Evans found that two out of three steroid users reported some noticeable health problem. Some of the problems, such as acne & shrunken testicles, resolve themselves after users quit the drugs; others, such as stretch marks around the muscles & enlarged breasts, can be permanent. "These are the changes [steroid users] perceive on their own," he said. "They don't know what's happening to their liver & kidney function, or their endocrine system."

Researchers can fill in part of this story. First, taking 600 mg a week or more of steroids can reduce levels of HDL, or "good," cholesterol after just a couple of months, doctors said. Low levels of HDL directly increase a person's risk of heart disease; and continuous steroid use over many months can drop those levels close to zero, said Dr. Linn Goldberg, a sports medicine researcher at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

Some people who take steroids orally, in pill form, also develop liver problems, due to cysts or tumors, both of which can be deadly. Finally, taking anabolic steroids suppresses the body's own production of testosterone: When taken continuously, they can cause hypogonadism. In his public comments acknowledging past steroid use, Caminiti said his testicles had shrunk & retracted.

Despite some suspected cases of so-called "roid rage," the risk of violent outbursts is not well understood. Some individuals participating in research studies are more aggressive on the drugs; most are not. The bottom line, some researchers now believe, is that steroid use appears to heighten the risk of angry violence in people who are disposed to it. "On the one hand, this roid rage appears to be rare," Bhasin said. "On the other hand, it only takes one outburst to cause very big problems."

It's this uncertainty that has led many steroid users to believe that the serious long-term risks of steroids have been exaggerated, said Evans. "They say, 'I'm living proof of the benefits, the doctors don't know what they're talking about,' " he said. "And they get all their advice on dosing & regimes from underground handbooks and other guys in the gym."
Though researchers do not have good studies of long-term users to counter this growing underground, they can point to several warning signs. During a 1990s investigation by East German sports officials, for example, former women athletes told stories of depression, liver problems and internal bleeding, among other things, according to author Steven Ungerleider, who wrote about the East German athletic program in his 2001 book "Faust's Gold." The athletes attributed their problems to the steroid regime.

In another report, published in 2000, Finnish researchers tracked the health of 62 power lifters. After 12 years, eight of the lifters, or 13%, had died: three of suicide, three of a heart attack, one of cancer and one of liver problems. The death rate was more than four times higher than the rate in a group of 1,094 people of similar age who were not bodybuilders. The difference was due in part to steroid use, the authors speculate.
Still, this study is hardly definitive, some researchers say. Competitive bodybuilders often take so many different drugs, ephedrine, creatine, vitamins, sports supplements, that it's not possible to separate the health effects of any single substance, these researchers say. "If we really have an epidemic of use going on, we should have a body count by now," said Thompson, the Hartford Hospital cardiologist. "The fact is that we don't have weightlifters dying in gyms. ... I'm not saying steroids are good for you or bad for you: My best guess is they're bad for you. But at this point I'm saying we really don't know."

The growing willingness to study people taking large doses of steroids is a sign that some investigators believe that the drugs may be taken safely, at least for short periods of time, under close monitoring by doctors. But in 1991 the govt classified anabolic steroids as a Schedule III controlled substance, a list that includes opium & morphine, among other potentially dangerous drugs. "We'd love to be able to follow a group of users and actually see what happens to them over time," Thompson said. "The problem is, it's illegal."

So while bodybuilders hide their habits, and sports fans speculate about their favorite players, doctors have no direct way to quantify the long-term risks of what some public health officials believe is a growing epidemic of use. "The larger issue is societal," Bhasin said. "As a society we haven't come to grips with what we really think of performance-enhancing substances. We put so much premium on winning, it's easy to see why athletes use them. And yet we have sports, like baseball, which have not even agreed to test for or ban steroid use."

S ynthetic
A T H L E T E S   		   
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    It's about Barry Bonds
    2.19.04   Patrick Daugherty SD Reader
Pitchers & catchers report to Padres spring-training camp on Friday. For Padres owner John Moores, the world is a sunshiney place. San Diego's new ballpark will dump big bucks into his bank account whether the Padres win or lose. All Moores has to do is place 9 uniformed employees on a baseball field 162 times over the course of 7 months, and he'll receive millions of dollars.
Let's clap our hands.

Sadly, the weather is not as sunshiney in every baseball principality. In fact, there is one king-hell of a scandal coming down the runway, and, unless a lot of powerful people, people who don't live in the Kingdom of Baseball, get off their butts and begin to manipulating events, we will have a scandal the likes of which has not been seen since 1919.
Happily, it appears powerful people are stirring, and, if you'll glance stage left, you'll see a classic containment strategy start to unfold. This is the "Why fon't we put the little guy with the 1950s dentist face, pencil mustache, badly dyed black hair, wire-rimmed spectacles in jail and let everybody else go back to sleep?"
It's the opening move of Operation Keep the Sun Shining over the Kingdom of Baseball.

Last week, 4 guys you never heard of were indicted in a San Francisco federal court on dozens of criminal charges, a few of which had to do with manufacturing & selling, for hundreds, occasionally thousands, of dollars, illegal performance enhancing drugs to Major League Baseball players and other world class athletes. If convicted, the 4 guys you never heard of will go to jail for 2 zillion years. In the meantime, the Major League Baseball players who eagerly sought, paid for, and used those drugs in order to inflate their prowess and thereby make millions of dollars off an intentional fraud, received immunity deals.

What follows is the briefest possible summary: June 2003, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency received a syringe in the mail that contained a performance enhancing drug that did not show up on tests. Then, the sender telephoned and named names. This led to retesting track & field athletes and the appearance of federal authorities.
Which led to a 9.3.03 raid on Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) by the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Food & Drug Administration, San Mateo Narcotics Task Force, and their usual law enforcement sidekicks. Which led to a federal grand jury, the testimony of Barry Bonds, and a supporting cast of millionaire athletes. This led to 2.12.04 indictment (conspiring to distribute steroids and launder money) of Greg F. Anderson, 37, personal trainer & childhood friend of Barry Bonds, and the indictment of ex-Tower of Power bass player and BALCO CEO Victor Conte Jr., 53, (conspiring to distribute steroids, launder money, commit fraud, possession of steroids & human growth hormone for sale, possession & delivery of misbranded drugs), his vice president James J. Valente, 49, and track coach Remi Korchemny, 71.

To give you an idea how infected baseball has become, in November 2003 the Kingdom announced that 5% to 7% of its 1200 players tested positive for steroids. That's a big enough number as to be a serious problem, but the test baseball imposed did not check for the presence of human growth hormone or the steroid BALCO was turning out. In addition, baseball players had advance warning that tests would be taken. Still, 5% to 7% of those tested failed, which works out to about 2 players per team.
I use Barry Bonds as an example because of his late maturation into Man of Steel, his peculiar home run record, his lifelong friendship with Greg Anderson, and his past association with BALCO … to the point of giving testimonials for the firm. Here's a man who played in the major leagues for 15 years and never hit more than 49 home runs. In 2001, a contract year, he hit 73 home runs, received the Kingdom's adulation, and a new $90 million contract. Bonds was 37 years old. Years earlier, when he first came into the league, media guides listed Bonds at 6'1" & 185 lbs. 16 seasons, one inch of height and 45 lbs of hard muscle later, Bonds smashes the home run record.

But, for all I know, Bonds is merely ingesting more zinc, and 342 coincidences in a row does not make him guilty in the eyes of the law. Yet. Or, more likely, ever.
What seems to be happening is the merciless prosecution of sidewalk scum while letting the big boys walk. You have to admit, it's a lot safer this way. Can you imagine the kind of rot a real investigation would uncover? Imagine all the performance records that would have to be tossed. Imagine the inevitable loss of auxiliary income.

Short term memory   Ask Shawne Merriman: football players can find absolution for their steroid sins. But in baseball the stain never fades.
1.6.07   Stephen Cannella Sports Illustrated

As the tattoo on his right forearm and the customized headrests and the floor mats in his Mercedes G500 proclaim, Shawne Merriman is LIGHTS OUT. the San Diego Chargers linebacker and NFL sacks leader use the handle in honor of his habit of dropping concussive, and, as we now know, chemically enhanced, hits on overmatched ball carriers.
But Lights Out tool on a slightly different meaning last week. Merriman missed practice on Friday because of a migraine, and as a longtime sufferer, he knew what to do..
"I just go in a dark room and don't even try to do anything", he said. "You can't fight it".

The NFL has taken the same approach with the headaches Merriman gave the league. Close your eyes, be quiet and wait til it goes away. A week before he missed workout, Merriman, 22, last year's NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year, was named to his second Pro Bowl despite the 4 game suspension he served this season for violating the league's substance abuse policy.
That honor is voted on by the league's coaches and players, as well as fans. Merriman is also a leading candidate to be named the league's Defensive Player of the Year, a title bestowed by members of the media.

Merriman tested positive for the steroid nandrolone, a drug he says he never knowingly took and must have ingested through a tainted supplement. That's his story, not that it matters anymore. When the subject is football, we are either very forgiving or very forgetful.
Merriman is a ferocious and speedy linebacker who finished with 17 sacks and 4 forced fumbles in 112 games. That's good enough for most people, if not Jason Taylor, Dolphin's defensive end who complained last week that you really shouldn't be able to fail a test like that and play in this league to begin with".

What makes the ethos of football interesting, instead of merely depressing, is that it is so different from the baseball player's world. In baseball, even the suspicion of drug use is a legacy killer. If he came out of hiding, you could ask Mark McGwire, who will almost certainly still be a non-Hall of Famer when this year's inductees are announced January 9.
Ditto for Rafael Palmiero, who was drummed out of the sport in disgrace two months after he joined the 3000 hit club because of a positive test. Ditto for Barry Bonds, whose breaking of a hallowed mark is an event being dreaded, not celebrated, by baseball.

The baseball scandal that began to brew last week underscores the difference between the sports, or rather how the players are viewed by their respective publics. On 12.27.06 a federal appeals court ruled that prosecutors in the BALCO investigation were entitled to the urine samples and names of more than 100 major leaguers who tested positive for steroids in 2003.
The testing, a survey to determine if the sport needed a mandatory program (it did), was agreed to by the players' union only after it was assured that the results would be anonymous and quickly destroyed.

The existence of the black list is sure to spark finger pointing between players and owners, and the union has vowed to fight the ruling. The court battle could last until 2008. If the past is any indication, it's only a matter of time, though, before names on the list leak out, creating a nightmare for the players involved, albeit a nightmare of their own making.
For starters, consider the ongoing perjury investigation against Barry Bonds, who told the BALCO grand jury in 2003 he never knowingly took steroids. The case against Bonds could be bolstered if there is finally hard evidence that the Giants slugger failed a drug test.

But Bonds has already been tainted, by the book Game of Shadows and by his own behavior in the wake of steroid allegations. Based on the court ruling, scores of other players, including All-Stars and future Hall of Famers may be having trouble sleeping, knowing that they are on the verge of being exposed as steroid users and going down in history with that simple indelible epitath.
Why the double standard? Perhaps because drug use in the NFL is more excusable because football is a game that pushed the limits of civilized behavior. Speed, power and violence are everything. In baseball, it's statistics, the links that bind the generations in our most history conscious game that are sacrosanct. Watching a pumped up linebacker level a quarterback gets America's pulse racing. Watching a steroidal slugger take aim at baseball's monuments sickens America's stomach.

So with McGwire, Palmero and other former baseball stars in an open ended exile, Merriman takes the position that he has served his time, four full weeks, and paid his fine and has no suffering left to do. He is leading San Diego into the playoffs, primed to burnish his growing legend further.
While baseball cheaters can probably never apologize enough, Merriman offers only a lawyered mea culpa and a hollow excuse. Taylor, as one of the few voices criticizing Merriman, knew he had to choose his words carefully.
"To make the Pro Bowl and all the other awards", Taylor said, "I think you're walking a fine line of sending the wrong message".

Merriman in response said he didn't care what Taylor or anyone else said. He also sent Taylor a Tshirt and hat adorned with his LIGHTS OUT logo. As a final touch, he included a bag of popcorn so, Merriman said, Taylor "can watch us in the playoffs".

In a way, Petco was built by Caminiti
Moores credits late slugger & Gwynn
4.22.05   Tom Krasovic SD UT

Honored last night by the Padres, the late Ken Caminiti made contributions that ultimately may have been worth tens of millions of dollars to the club. Caminiti's exploits in 1996 and later in the club's drive to the 1998 World Series helped win public support for the downtown ballpark, which the club deemed essential to long term survival in San Diego.

"I don't know for sure that we wouldn't have a ballpark here if it weren't for Ken Caminiti and Tony Gwynn," said Padres chairman John Moores, while standing in one of the plush suites at $474 million Petco Park. Caminiti, who died in October at age 41, said he took anabolic steroids in 1996 to build strength and cope with a torn left shoulder that required open surgery after the season. The third baseman and cleanup hitter went on that year to lead the club to its first National League West title in 12 years.

Caminiti's $3.05 million salary in '96 ranked 99th in the league. Ravaged by injuries 2 years later, he didn't get the payoff he wanted when he sought a contract extension and was told by Moores that the club didn't believe any player was worth $7 million in annual salary, a remark Moores later confirmed. It was Moores who decided the club should honor Caminiti, and it was Moores who insisted the club employ Caminiti as a coach in spring training last year.

Manager Bruce Bochy praised the decision to honor Caminiti, whose jersey No. 21 was painted on the grass behind home plate. "This guy was all about winning and sacrificing himself," Bochy said. "No one can take away from how he handled himself on the field and in the clubhouse. I consider myself fortunate to have this guy with me as a player or a friend."
Said Moores, "Ken was a warrior when he played for the Padres. I don't think anybody ever played a better third base than Cammy did in his MVP year."


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