More high schools consider or reject steroid tests

Officials in California and Maryland speak about steroid testing in preps.  First to California, where recent news had a high school football team devolve to 'roids, fight club, then crime.

From the Californian:

MURRIETA ---- Recent police allegations that a handful of former Murrieta football players used illegal steroids "to enhance their performance on the field" have prompted some local residents to debate the merits of random, mandatory drug-testing programs for student athletes.

Although there is no law stopping school district officials from randomly drug-testing students involved in sports, music programs or campus clubs, none in Southwest County do so. (more after the jump)

In fact, the only district in Riverside County randomly drug-testing students is the Val Verde Unified School District in Perris. Fifty-one other districts across the state also do, according to the California Department of Education.

Cost, privacy concerns and the desire to use different tactics to sway students from bad choices are the primary reasons most school districts don't mandate testing, a state official said Friday...

(An official) said the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures affords students privacy protections, and to get around that school districts often send the results only to parents and the student's doctor, he said.

Even so, two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, one in 1995 and another in 2002, paved the way for districts to be able to drug-test despite concerns they are unjustified invasions of privacy, he said.

Even with the legal go-ahead, the education department prefers promoting healthy lifestyles over forced drug tests, he said, citing a bill it supported three years ago that would have made it more difficult for school districts to drug-test students. It was vetoed by (former steroid user, eds note) Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In a survey of students done for the California Interscholastic Federation in March 2004, 11 percent of boys, 42,032 student athletes, and 5 percent of girls, 13,711 student athletes, admitted taking performance-enhancing drugs or supplements.

With regard to the Murrieta allegations, "some members of The Fight Club gang began by injecting anabolic steroids to enhance their performance on the field," stated a Feb. 18 release from the Murrieta Police Department, referring to a group of former students recently arrested...

BY THE NUMBERS

Each year, school districts across the state report to the California Department of Education on a variety of issues, including on drug testing policies. The following data is for the 2005-06 school year.

- 24 percent use dogs to sniff out drugs and other illegal contraband at schools.

- 16 percent drug-test students if they have some sort of reasonable suspicions.

- 7 percent mandate randomly drug-testing students in extracurricular activities.

- 5 percent mandate randomly drug-testing students not involved in extracurricular activities.

Now to Maryland, from the Carroll County Times, where roughly 1 in 6 athletes said they knew of steroid use:

New Jersey recently became the first state to test prep athletes for steroid abuse, and the latest results showed no positives out of 150 tests.

That's a good thing, seeing as how national studies have shown 2 percent of teenagers use steroids before they graduate.

The New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association also stated it would randomly test athletes at tournaments during the 2006-07 school year.

Five years ago, the Times conducted a survey with 88 first-team all-county athletes from the spring season. We asked the athletes a "yes or no" question -- if they had any knowledge of prep athletes taking steroids, and 14 of them said yes.

So roughly one out of every six all-county kids from that spring knew of someone who was abusing steroids while participating in athletics.

Casey Brengle, a Westminster graduate who earned all-county honors in softball that year, predicted the numbers would soon grow, that steroid use was "heading to a bad point."

South Carroll grad Greg Kennell, the Times' Boys Track and Field Athlete of the Year in 2002, recalled feeling shocked when a fellow athlete tried to use steroids the previous year to help gain body mass at a more rapid pace.

Kennell, at the time, said the steroid issue "needs to be addressed in high school, right away."

Comments

[sportsfan]

The game of football needs to become irrelevent, like boxing. The game is too important in our society and steroid use in HS is rampant because of it.

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