[Jim Vertuno, AP via Chron.com]
By the tens of thousands, Texas student-athletes have been pulled out of class to urinate in a cup for the nation’s largest high school steroids testing program.
Boys and girls in all sports, from football to tennis to cross country, have been randomly selected.
The results so far have found little to confirm fears that steroid use is a rampant problem. When the first 10,000 tests found only four positive results, critics declared the two-year program a waste of time and money.
Now state lawmakers must decide whether to keep the $6 million program chugging along, scale it down or eliminate it. The 2009 legislative session starts Tuesday.
The Texas legislator who sponsored the testing bill in 2007 calls it an “incredible success.”
The point of testing was to act as a deterrent against steroid use, not catch teens using drugs, said Rep. Dan Flynn, a Republican.
“We don’t have a bunch of pelts hanging on the wall,” Flynn said. “The success is that we haven’t had a lot of positive tests.”
Representative Flynn's catagorization of spending $1.5 Million dollars for each positive result highlights the idiocy behind the current wave of anti-steroid mania that's sweeping through the halls of leadership.
Not that 3CB is "pro-steroid" mind you. I'm decidedly anti-performance enhancement beyond nutritional supplements and state-of-the-art training. (yes, training is performance enhancement as well.) What I'm against is going on a witch-hunt to protect people from themselves spending Millions of dollars on testing that's not effective at deterring use, or catching users for that matter.
There's a saying in bodybuilding that "Only those stupid enough to fail a steroid test actually fail a steroid test." This adage was proven recently when the International Federation of Bodybuilders "augmented" their testing program and failed to catch a single drug cheat. According to outsider's they have in place a decent random testing system, and can't catch their athletes using steroids.
No offense to Rep. Flynn, but it seems that an even bigger success would be to stop wasting $6 Million per year on a program of dubious worth.
