Musing's musings

It's time we said "No" to "Just say no"

For my money, one of the worst legacies of the 1980s is the phrase "Just say no"--and everything it stands for. It was a stupid idea when it was launched (and was rightfully mocked), and it certainly hasn't gotten any better with age.

The problem with "Just say no" (and with so many other nostrums that the tighty-righties have come up with over the years) is that it attempts to reduce an irreducibly complex issue to a slogan. Worse, the tighty-righties and their allies-cum-enablers in many a Republican administration since the days of Nancy Reagan have clung for dear life to that slogan and the perniciously ignorant attitudes it fosters toward serious problems like drug and alcohol abuse, teen-age sex, and HIV/AIDS. I can't help but notice that none of the gleeful crowd of finger-waggers has ever tried to apply the same philosophy to, oh, I don't know, anything like manufacturing pointless and illegal wars, bending over backwards to assist the rich in getting richer while simultaneously rogering the working class, or trampling on the Constitution. Nor has it escaped my notice than many of the most egregious finger-waggers (see, e.g., Ted Haggard, Rush Limbaugh, and others) have quite spectacularly failed to practice for themselves what they so often and so vociferously preach to others.

Take off the rose-colored glasses already!

I have never understood baseball, or Americans' fascination with it. As sports go, it is rivaled for sheer unrelieved boredom (in my not-so-humble opinion) only by golf and possibly football (the kind that we on this side of the pond call "soccer"). The last time I was forced to go to a baseball game (because a friend was singing the national anthem), another friend and I whiled away the hours between the end of the anthem and the start of the fireworks for Independence Day by playing cards--an activity that got us quite a few incredulous-cum-irritated looks from people near us in the stands.

It should therefore come as no surprise that I totally fail to understand the response of many to the release of the Mitchell Report on the use of performance-enhancing substances in professional baseball. To hear many of those appearing in the media to comment on the report, you'd think that Americans had been living in a cave for the last couple of decades, without any access to the news media or other sources of information. They seem to have been laboring under the impression that baseball was this great pure and holy thing, populated solely and exclusively by superhuman beings of impeccable rectitude whose only concern was for the sport itself, with no thought in their minds of self, fame, or fortune. It's usually at about that point in those stories that I'm forced to turn off the radio, click back to my home page, or run for the nearest porcelain god, gripped with an overpowering nausea.

My own reaction to the Mitchell Report is much closer to this one. In fact, as I was listening to the NPR hosts, reporters, and commentators discussing the report yesterday, the one word that kept running through my mind--and frequently found its way past the barrier of my teeth (to steal a phrase from Homer)--was "Duh."

Anyone not dead, asleep, comatose, or irretrievably trapped in Fantasyland for the last 20 years could have predicted what former Senator George Mitchell would (and did, in fact) find. And anyone who could still maintain that baseball players were only concerned about the glory of the game and the purity of sport should contact me right away: I have some lovely oceanfront property in Iowa that I'm looking to unload, cheap.

As players' salaries (along with the prices of tickets, memorabilia, and even food at the venues) have risen well beyond the level of obscenity, it should have been obvious that there would be tremendous pressure on all concerned to continue performing at ever-higher levels, the better to maintain the interest of the fans--to say nothing of their willingness to continue shelling out for those outrageously priced tickets, memorabilia, and food items. Add to that the league's need to win back fans after the 1994 strike wiped out most of the season and, for the first time in the history of professional sports, the entire postseason and championship, and the pressure to perform was even more obvious.

When you consider that no more than about 1,200 players at any given time will be able to play the game at its highest level in the major leagues, whereas more than 10 times that number played in college (there are 30 teams in major league baseball, whereas there are nearly 300 colleges and universities that play baseball in the NCAA's Division I alone)--to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands or millions more that never make it to a college scholarship but still play in Little League, in high school, in the myriads of recreational leagues, or professionally in the minor leagues--it should be intuitively obvious that the pressure to find an "edge," some way of distinguishing oneself from the hordes of other athletes all seeking the same goal, is tremendous and unrelenting. Of course some of the less-scrupulous types are going to turn to drugs, hormones, or other shortcuts to achieve their desired end.

And when you get right down to it, it seems to me, we are every bit as much to blame for that sad fact as the athletes who cheat are. We teach our children, by example if not in so many words, that the only thing that matters in life is getting ahead, being the best, being number-one. We tell them that winning is everything, that nobody wants to be known as a loser or a failure. Consequently, if they can't get to where they've been told they need to be the old-fashioned way, then they'll use whatever means they can find.

It was refreshing to listen to some young baseball players discussing the Mitchell Report on NPR last night as I was driving home after work, all agreeing that it was wrong for players to take shortcuts and expressing firm resolutions that they would never, ever do the same. Yet I had to wonder whether they would be able to live up to those promises, and also how many other young players that didn't make it onto the radio would rationalize their decision to try "the juice" by reference to the fact that so many of their idols, the heroes of the sport, had done so. We don't yet know what the consequences of being named in the Mitchell Report will be for those players--but every kid who follows baseball can, I'd be willing to bet, name their accomplishments. I'm very much afraid that the desire to meet or beat those achievements will ultimately carry far more weight than any of the eventual penalties will.

Things that make you go "Huh?"

Over dinner this evening, I came across this story in today's San Francisco Chronicle that has me scratching my head and wondering what (if anything) I'm missing:

Teenage abuse of common cough medications has grown ominously in recent years, according to San Francisco researchers who found a fifteenfold increase in calls to poison control centers since 1999 for teens made sick by overdosing on household drugs that can cause hallucinogenic highs.

The ingredient sought by youthful drug abusers is dextromethorphan, or DXM, which comes in a wide variety of over-the-counter pills and syrups that researchers say are promoted by Web sites telling users how to take them recreationally.

[edit]

The overdoses of DXM required to produce hallucinations can cause health problems such as rapid heartbeat, lethargy and high blood pressure. But the pills also contain what Anderson called "hidden" ingredients that can be life-threatening.

[edit]

[Elizabeth] Assey said [the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a Washington organization of over-the-counter drugmakers] favors laws that would prevent the sale of cough medicines to teens, but does not believe that the drugs should be locked behind the counter -- a step taken to limit sales of pseudoephedrine, a decongestant that can be chemically processed into methamphetamine.

"We're supportive of age restrictions, but we don't feel age restrictions alone will address it,'' she said.

A couple of questions occurred to me after reading this story. I'm going to deal with the second, smaller one first. That has to do with the CHPA's idea that restricting the sale of cough medicines to teen-agers is an appropriate response to the problem of dextromethorphan abuse. As Jon Stewart would say, "Wha-huh?"

I can't believe I'm about to say this

...but I agree with Clarence Thomas.

The Supreme Court today ruled that Congress has the power to prohibit medical marijuana use even if a state or locality has legalized it. The majority opinion (PDF link), written by John Paul Stevens, argues that Congress has the power, under the Interstate Commerce Clause, to regulate "transactions" that don't involve the exchange of money, that don't involve other people, and that don't cross state lines.

Justice Thomas dissented, and for once, I think he has the right idea. His dissent (p. 62 of the linked PDF file) begins thus:

Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congresscan regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.