Virginia Republican Congressman Tom Davis claims steroids are a public health crisis. That's why he and his colleagues have gone to the trouble of summoning some of the biggest stars in baseball to Capitol Hill to testify. It's about--all together now--protecting our children.
Let's say the motive for this steroids hearing is, in fact, about protecting America's kids from the harmful influence of sports leagues that care only about boosting ticket sales and TV ratings. Then I imagine we can expect a big ballyhooed hearing soon on the substance that is most glorified by sports leagues and kills more kids every year than every other drug combined: Alcohol.
No single industry promotes the consumption of alcohol among teenagers as much as college and professional sports.
Nebraska Republican Rep. Tom Osborne knows a bit about college and professional sports. He played for the 49ers, then coached the University of Nebraska football team for 36 years. During those years on the Nebraska campus, he says he dealt with only three students who abused steroids--and thousands who abused alcohol.
"Probably 85 to 90 percent of the negative incidents on campus, whether dealing with players or other students, were in some way related to alcohol,'' Osborne explained. "About 70,000 sexual assaults each year are related to alcohol, and 500,000 injuries.
"We have justifiable anxiety over 1,500 (American) deaths in Iraq of a two-year period, but alcohol kills 1,400 college students annually.''
That is a public health crisis and why, as Osborne's colleagues delve into baseball's secret little underworld, he'll be elsewhere, calling upon the National Collegiate Athletic Association to ban alcohol commercials from all broadcasts of the NCCA basketball tournament.
"Colleges and universities continue to take money from beer companies whose ads glamorize drinking and target a youthful audience,'' Osborne said. "They're sending very mixed messages to their students, because every college president will tell you that the No. 1 problem on their campus is alcohol.''
The 1,400 college students who die each year from alcohol-related injuries translates to three or four students every single day. Try to find any reputable research that says steroids has killed a single child. There isn't any. Several suicides have been linked to steroid use, but as tragic as they are, they do not constitute a public health crisis. The numbers of kids using steroids in the U.S. barely registers on the scale of teen drug use. In a 1999 study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2.7 percent of 8th- and 10th-graders and 2.9 percent of 12th-graders had taken steroids.
By contrast, 80 percent of high school seniors have used alcohol; 32 percent say they had been drunk in the last month. About 3 million teens are said to be alcoholics.
Baseball's unwillingness to acknowledge its role in glamorizing steroids, however unintentional that promotion might be, is nothing compared to its unwillingness to acknowledge its role in glamorizing alcohol.
Nearly 1,000 alcohol commercials aired in 2002 during the telecasts of the Super Bowl, the World Series, college football bowl games and the National Football League's Monday Night Football broadcasts, according to the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth.
Every time a kid tunes in to a March Madness game the next two weeks, he or she will see an average of four advertisements of attractive young people having a great time drinking. By year's end, this one kid will see about 245 such ads. When researchers from Teenage Research Unlimited in 2002 asked teens to choose their favorite commercials, more named commercials for Budweiser than for any other brand, including Pepsi and Nike.
But it's not only television commercials that associate sports with alcohol. Kids see enormous Bud ads on scoreboards at stadiums. They see Coors as the official name of the Colorado Rockies ballpark. Down the road from Capitol Hill, they see promotions for Smirnoff Ice and Captain Morgan's Gold products in the Washington Redskins' stadium and on television during Redskins broadcasts. They see Crown Royal as the official sponsor of auto racing's International Race of Champions. The list goes on.
The money and power the alcohol industry wields are enormous. In 2003, when a landmark National Academy of Sciences report to Congress concluded that underage drinking costs the United States $52 billion a year, he co-sponsored a bill that would have funded new efforts to prevent kids from drinking. The bill failed even to reach the House floor, thanks to vigorous lobbying against it.
The National Beer Wholesalers Association is the fifth-highest spender of all political action committees in Washington. The alcohol industry spent $10,164,916 last year in Washington to promote its products.
Last month, Osborne and his co-sponsors reintroduced the "STOP Underage Drinking'' bill, and its passage is as unlikely today as it was last year and the year before.
"You're swimming upstream,'' Osborne said of fighting Big Alcohol.
Even the House Government Reform Committee concedes that no legislation will come out of today's steroids hearing. Steroids are already illegal without a prescription. Baseball already is moving, however slowly, toward a stricter drug policy. What, then, is the point of Congress devoting an entire workday and hauling in baseball stars and executives?
A hearing about sports and alcohol would mean a parade of parents and experts testifying about drunken driving accidents, violence, rape, unsafe sex, suicide, educational failures and crime. It would mean a photo exhibit of the 1,400 college students lost last year to alcohol. Such powerful testimony surely would put pressure on Congress to do something about it.
And that's why the recent hearing was about steroids.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her e-mail at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.