In a scandal that brought bad name to the police department, eleven Boston police officers have been reprimanded for their alleged role in context to steroids.

This scandal has forced senior officials to tighten and revise their drug policies and resulted in prison time for four involved patrolmen.

Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said that he was not happy with the action taken against the eleven culprits in the uniform. Seven of the eleven officers who admitted to steroids at some point in their careers were asked to give a written reprimand to a suspension for 45 days without any pay. However, none of the guilty officers were fired and will not be facing any criminal charges against them.

From Boston.com:

The punishments were the culmination of an investigation that began in August 2006 soon after the FBI arrested Officer Roberto “Kiko” Pulido for trying to traffic cocaine. Pulido, a steroid user, would guard parties hosted by a convicted drug dealer at an after-hours club in Hyde Park called the “Boom Boom Room.”

Pulido was sentenced to 26 years in prison. Two other officers, Nelson Carrasquillo and Carlos Pizarro, received sentences of 18 years and 13 years, respectively.

Two of the 11 officers were disciplined for going to the club in uniform and while they were on duty. The club sat above an auto body shop on Factory Street, where prostitutes and dancers mingled with police and where alcohol and drugs were readily available.

The Globe reported in March 2008 that a federal grand jury was investigating steroid use and after-hours parties involving Boston officers.

Acting US Attorney Michael Loucks said today that the federal investigation regarding Pulido and steroids use in the Boston Police Department has been closed. Pulido pleaded guilty in November 2008 to charges that he conspired to traffic cocaine and heroin from Western Massachusetts to Jamaica Plain. He was sentenced to 26 years in federal prison.

The disciplinary action against the officers ends one of the most embarrassing chapters in the department’s history, but questions linger about how effective the police can be in controlling steroid use in the department, considering how difficult it is to test for the drug. Unlike other narcotics, steroid testing is much more expensive and results from taking hair samples can be less accurate, resulting in false positives.

All of the eleven officers will be subjected to drug tests for their entire careers.

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Some high schools are confident that their students are safe from the steroid because random testing have yielded very few positive results. There has been a concern of steroid use trickling down to the younger athletes because of the influence of players in pro sports. The issue of Alex Rodriguez and all the other baseball players involved in the use of performance enhancing drugs had the high school officials worried that their students could be into these substances as well. Random drug testing was conducted in both Cumberland Valley High and Boiling Springs High.

From The Sentinel:

“If we find we are having a problem with steroids, we can say to test for steroids every week of testing,” said Assistant Superintendent Mary Riley. “However, I would say, because of the lack of positive test results for steroids, it does not appear that Cumberland Valley is having a problem with these among our student-athletes.”

Neither is Boiling Springs High School.

“I don’t think it’s an issue in our school district,” said Athletic Director Scott Govern. “I don’t think there is a need at this point. We are a smaller school. I don’t think we have a problem.”

The Associated Press reported that in 2006 four states, namely New Jersey, Texas, Illinois, and Florida had performed random drug tests to almost 30,799 students and only 20 were reported positive. This proved that the fears of school authorities are unfounded. That or the testing methods were flawed.

The government said that getting high school students are very expensive and it is not worth doing if there doesn’t seem to be a problem of steroids in high school sports. Per test costs $200 which is quite a lot most especially at this time when the nation is facing a global financial crisis.

What high school authorities could do for now is to continue educating their students on the bad effects of steroids and how it has damaged the careers and lives of athletes.

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With the rampant use of steroids in professional sports, government authorities have gone down to high schools where they believe that the use of the performance enhancing drug had reached this level. High school students are likely victims of steroid abuse because they emulate their favorite sports celebrities.

However, there is a cause for concern because drug tests results have proven that of the many who were subjected to the testing only a small fraction of them tested positive. New Jersey, Texas, Florida and Illinois have tested high school students for steroids since 2006. Based on the tests they conducted on almost 30,000 students only 20 came back positive.

In the midst of recession spending $200 per student for a drug test which is suspected to be flawed is a waste of the taxpayers’ money.

From The Associated Press:

Missouri state Sen. Matt Bartle tried to push his colleagues to adopt a statewide high school steroid testing program because he was concerned that young athletes were emulating the bad habits of some professionals.

But when Florida dropped its program in 2008 after a costly one-year trial in which there was only one positive out of 600 students tested, Bartle decided a similar effort wouldn’t be cost-effective in Missouri, and he didn’t submit a proposal this year.

“Is there enough steroid use out there that spending a couple million bucks a year against everything else that the state needs to spend money on is worth it?” Bartle asked.

The state programs grew out of health concerns and doping scandals in baseball, cycling and track and field. Last month, New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez became the latest name tied to performance-enhancing drugs, admitting he used them while with the Texas Rangers from 2001-03.

A professor from Oregon said that the only way to make students stop taking steroids is if they make the decision to stop taking them, not because some drug test had forced them to. Peer pressure is also a major factor that should be considered. Which is why education against steroids should be supported in high schools.

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Drug tests conducted among athletes in international sports may not be accurate, according to Swiss researchers who are asking for the temporary suspension of ongoing drug testing of foreign athletes. This inaccuracy would be due to ethnic differences that had not been taken into consideration prior to administering the tests.

The British Journal of Sports Medicine published this study at the height of the steroid use in international sports. According to the said study the ratio of testosterone and epitosterone in the urine tells whether the specimen is positive for steroid content. The threshold for athletes is four and above. But it has been discovered that this threshold varies depending on the ethnicity. It has been proven that the gene UGT2B17 varies for every ethnicity. These variations affect the metabolic rate and consequently affects the rate of testosterone that comes out of the urine.

From The Los Angeles Times:

In the new study, Swiss researchers demonstrated the inaccuracy of using a threshold of four for everyone. They added steroids to urine samples from 171 athletes: 57 men of black African ethnicity, 32 of Asian ethnicity, 32 of Hispanic ethnicity and 50 Caucasians. The men were soccer players between the ages of 18 and 36. The researchers found a variation in the UGT2B17 gene in 22% of the athletes, including eight out of 10 Asian men.

Based on the genetic variations, the researchers recalibrated the thresholds for suspected doping for each group and concluded an appropriate threshold would be 5.6 for men of black African ethnicity, 5.7 for Caucasians, 5.8 for Hispanics and 3.8 for Asian men.

International sports stars like Barry Bonds, Major League baseball stars Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez now face the consequences of being involved in steroids use. Both Bonds and Clemens face perjury raps for allegedly lying about their steroid use. Rodriguez on the other hand had admitted that he used PEDs in 2001-2003 while with the Texas Rangers.

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Barry Bonds’ defense attorneys will have to prepare several ways to counter the potential evidence that the prosecution might draw from the urine sample that had tested positive for “the cream”, an anabolic steroid. Bonds has always passed the drug tests in the Major Leagues. In 2003, he admitted to have used a “clear” and a “cream” substance but he claimed that he didn’t know that these were steroids. Bonds thought that they were flaxseed oil and something used for arthritis. In 2004, federal agents managed to seize a sample of Bonds’ urine from a laboratory that had done the survey tests for baseball. The sample was re-analyzed and showed a positive result for the designer steroid. Several issues and debates have stemmed from the actions of the investigators. Defense attorneys might try to make the urine sample unusable as evidence since by arguing custody issues. They aren’t even sure if it was legal to seize the sample which was supposed to be destroyed 30 days after the laboratory had done its test. The laboratory that had done the survey test may also be held liable for not following drug testing protocols such as destroying the samples

From Daily News:

MLB and the Players Association agreed to a survey testing program in 2003 to determine the extent of steroid use in the sport. The tests were supposed to be anonymous and players were not disciplined if they tested positive.

The 2003 samples have been the source of a contentious legal battle between the government and baseball since April 2004, when federal agents investigating BALCO executed a search warrant on Quest Diagnostics and Comprehensive Drug Testing in Long Beach, Calif., the labs that coordinated MLB’s drug testing program, and seized the samples.

MLB and the Players Association filed a lawsuit against the government and after several turns through the courts, the case is now being considered by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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