Author: Ryan Graff, Lauren Siverly
America has always had a fascination with celebrities, including professional athletes. This is exemplified in the way that the United States government has spent upwards of six million dollars over the last seven years to build a case against Barry Bonds for his ALLEGED use of steroids and other performance enhancing substances. No fan is going to sleep better at night because Barry Bonds is behind bars. Instead of worrying about prosecuting violent offenders and dealing with America’s laundry list of issues outside of professional sports, district attorneys are spending citizens’ tax dollars to charge athletes with perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about their use of banned substances.
The U.S. government should not devote funds to a losing enterprise, chiefly prosecuting athletes who will get off scot-free in the end.
In the world of sports, and more specifically Major League Baseball (MLB), there is an important distinction between drugs that are controlled substances, which the government bans the use of, and substances that institutions like MLB ban their players from using. As such, the league can hand out punishments for legal substances that are banned from the sport but must rely on the federal government to punish an athlete that uses a drug that is not a controlled substance.
America’s drug laws further complicate the prosecution of MLB players who use performance enhancers. No individual, athlete or not, can be prosecuted solely for admitting they used illegal drugs. Furthermore, due to ex post facto laws, they cannot be punished in any way for taking a currently illegal substance that was legal during their use. These stipulations force prosecutors to seek other ways to punish a player for using banned substances.
Typically, this means that athletes are often subject to perjury and obstruction of justice charges that give the prosecution a way to indirectly punish them for their use of performance enhancers. Unfortunately, this way of punishing them does nothing for the sport or give the fans peace of mind that justice is being served.
The truth of the matter is that the government spends millions of dollars to prove that athletes are lying about their use of steroids when, in reality, the reason they should be punished is for their actual use of the drugs. Major League Baseball in essence signed its own death certificate by taking too many years to institute an explicit drug suspension policy. For too long, athletes have gotten away with minor suspensions or no punishment at all for using banned substances.
When former Maine senator George Mitchell released his infamous “Mitchell Report” in 2007, the league finally realized it needed to clean up its act.
The report was an investigative work in which Mitchell named 89 then-current and former players who either used or were associated with the use of performance enhancing drugs. By having to go outside of itself to seek justice, MLB earned a bad reputation for being too entrenched in its own problems to offer any viable solutions.
Since the report, the league has attempted to implement a top-down approach to combat steroid use. Some players named in the report were subpoenaed and were forced to testify in front of Congress in order to provide evidence against the drug corporations like Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO). This inevitably led to the perjury and obstruction of justice problem, but many of the athletes named in the report have never even been called before court for testimony.
Bud Selig, commissioner of the MLB, proposed an incredibly strict drug policy in which the first offense results in a season-long suspension, the second offense comes with a temporary ban that requires reinstatement and the third offense earns a lifetime ban from the sport. It literally was a “three strikes and you’re out” policy.
This policy never came to fruition and the Major Leagues still have one of the most lax steroid testing programs in professional sports. Since MLB has the biggest problem with steroid use, they should crack down even harder and adopt a much stricter policy.
Despite this almost decade-long circus act in which millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been flushed down the toilet, America’s infatuation with professional athletes almost always ensures that the offending athletes are let off the hook. In the meantime, the fan and the taxpayer, who are one in the same, lose.
The sport and his records have already been tarnished, and a retrospective punishment means absolutely nothing. In the words of former MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti during the 1994 MLB player strike, “The people of America care about baseball. Not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust.”
In the end, the players must clean up their own acts to guarantee that America’s pastime survives the steroid generation. The United States government should stop wasting federal funds and fighting a losing battle when it comes to congressional hearings.
Ryan Graff is a first year ECLS major and Lauren Siverly is an undeclared first year. They can be reached at graff@oxy.edu and siverly@oxy.edu, respectively.
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