The Shame of the Steroid Hunt

By Matt Welch, AlterNet. Posted March 21, 2005.

Let's re-cap. A congressional body called the House Committee on Government Reform – not the House Committee on "Getting Past" the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, not the House Committee on Urinalysis, but the House Committee on Government Freakin' Reform – spent 11 hours on national television Thursday advocating several dozen illiberal measures that would give the government even more far-reaching power to harass individuals and neuter their labor unions. A microscopic sampling of these terrible ideas:

• Federally mandated drug tests for all professional and amateur athletes, down to junior high school lacrosse players.
• Ripping up federal labor laws.
• Butting into the collective bargaining process of a single, targeted private industry.
• Forcing private employers to share their confidential drug tests with the FBI.

The response from the nation's Fourth Estate? "Congress delivers heat, McGwire takes weak fifth swing"; "McGwire's image cannot be saved"; "McGwire whiffs on Hall [of Fame] pass."

In case anyone needed reminding, when sportswriters see someone holding a match to the Constitution, their instinctive reaction is to ask: "Where's the lighter fluid?"

Mark McGwire – who has never, to my knowledge, held a government job or enforced the nation's drug laws – had his reputation ruined by being forced to confront questions that suspected coke-sniffer George W. Bush and his non-inhaling predecessor never once had to face under oath. When the retired slugger concluded, reasonably, that answering specifics about his personal intake would put him at risk of endless government investigations, the reaction was as overwhelming as it was predictable.

"It could not have been more indicting," wrote Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke, "if he had begun picking his teeth with a syringe." (A week earlier, the constitutionally-challenged columnist declared that anyone who refused to testify was "guilty.")

Plaschke, like all L.A. Times employees (and most American newspaper journalists) is subject to drug tests from his employer. The process he just applauded can now be used to confiscate his own piss, hand it over to the authorities and compel him to testify under oath, possibly without the benefit of legal representation.

Drug tests that baseball players assumed were confidential have ended up in the hands of federal investigators. The Government Reform Committee successfully subpoenaed records of all drug use-related punishment Major League Baseball has handed out for the past 15 years, even though that, too, was supposed to be between the Player's Union and management, as agreed upon in collective bargaining. At every step, across several overlapping government investigations and hearings, evidence that was supposed to remain secret – like, say, Barry Bonds' lawyer-free grand jury testimony at the BALCO trial – has been rushed into the public domain.

This public shaming of high-profile athletes – often enabled through expressly illegal means, such as the grand jury leaks – has been a conscious policy all along, far outstripping any real desire to prosecute criminals, or even get at the truth about steroid use.

The BALCO case got its start when a zealous Bay Area-based Internal Revenue Service investigator and former athlete named Jeff Novitzky became annoyed at the concept of a suspiciously muscular jerk like Barry Bonds breaking the all-time home-run record. "He's such an asshole to the press," Novitzky reportedly told an associate. "I'd sure like to prove it."

Ironically, Novitzky probably never will – at least in a court of law. Despite an investigatory fishing expedition of a grand jury, Bonds so far stands accused of no crime, and has only admitted under oath that he unknowingly and briefly used two substances that might have resembled illegal steroids. But the court of public opinion has already hanged Bonds as well, in part because Novitzky made sure the cameras were rolling when his team burst through the doors of BALCO back in September 2003, and because someone gave the San Francisco Chronicle the sealed court transcript of Bonds' testimony this past December.

Matt Welch is an associate editor at Reason. His work is archived at mattwelch.com.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »