"Gather round drug users. Drug and substance testing to be held next Friday."
What if that announcement come out to a group of dangerous meth addicts? How would the public safety, or their personal health be served by a prior announcement of drug testing? Obviously any drug user with half a brain will seek to avoid the testing, or detoxify the substance from his body.
The New York Times says this happens in baseball, even after the Mitchell Report warning of last winter.
When George J. Mitchell issued his report last December on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, Commissioner Bud Selig quickly embraced the report’s findings. He then went further, saying baseball would immediately end a practice under which drug testers were giving major league teams 24-hour notice before they showed up in clubhouses to collect urine samples from players.
The 24-hour notice had been roundly criticized by antidoping experts, who said it undermined the integrity of baseball’s drug program, which called for random, unannounced testing.
Despite that change, minor league teams still received advance notice of when testing would occur this season, according to eight people who work in the minor leagues.
One doesn't need to be an anti-doping expert to criticize this set-up; a dollop of common sense would suffice to know that testing needs to be done by an independent agency to avoid a conflict of interest, and to test players at secure sites without advance knowledge..
In recent interviews, four minor league managers, two team trainers, one general manager and one clubhouse attendant said the manager or trainer for their club was called by a tester the day before drug testing was to be done at the ballpark.
None of them said that they knew of any instances when players were told about the tests ahead of time.
However, one Class A manager who said he received a call from a tester during the season, said that if he believed one of his players was “dirty,” he would have been tempted to tell the player that a tester would be coming the next day and that he should try to flush out any drugs from his system.
The manager said he believed there would be others who would be tempted to tip off suspect players and that the practice of advance notice had to be eliminated. The manager spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified as being critical of the drug-testing procedures.
So why the advance notice?
“Under the minor league policy, collections are performed by the Center for Drug Free Sport, which is a wholly independent entity,” Richard Levin, a spokesman for Major League Baseball, said in an e-mail message dated Sept. 15. “The center was directed to give only nominal notice, no more than 45 minutes, to a club prior to a collection.”
Asked in an e-mail message the next day as to how Major League Baseball planned to address the issue, Levin responded in an e-mail message: “Once we learned that there were occasions on which the Center for Drug Free Sport gave overnight notice to clubs, we took prompt corrective action to prevent such notice from being given in the future.”
A number of the minor league employees who were interviewed said advance notice in the minor leagues extended back at least several seasons.
Apparently players in the Dominican Summer League receive less notice:
The bulk of the positive results in organized baseball in 2008 occurred in the Dominican Summer League, a development program run by major league teams in which some of the players were as young as 16. This year marked the first time that players in the Dominican league faced suspensions for positive tests, and 36 were publicly identified as testing positive.
Why attempt drug and steroid testing if is performed in a sloppy protocol? Read the Times for more info on the lax minor league testing procedure.
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