On June 26, 2014, on the island of Fiji, participants from seven Pacific island nations – American Samoa, Cook Island, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu – successfully completed their Play True Anti-Doping Masters Education training.i Given the global reach of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its pedagogical ambitions, it is no […]
Cops on Steroids: The Scandal That Never Left New Jersey
One morning in August 2007, Dr. Joseph Colao dropped dead of a heart attack in his apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, at the age of forty-five. His sudden death set off alarms among the hundreds of New Jersey police officers and firefighters to whom he prescribed and sometimes sold anabolic steroids and human growth […]
Testosterone for Women: Waiting for the Female Aphrodisiac
In December 2004 a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs refused to recommend Procter & Gamble’s Intrinsa testosterone patch for female sexual dysfunction (FSD) in surgically menopausal women whose ovaries had been removed. The FDA panel found that administering testosterone to these patients would produce an average of one […]
Dopers in Uniform: Cops on Steroids
As the U.S. Congress prepares to renew its assault on anabolic steroid use among professional athletes at a hearing scheduled for May 18, longtime observers of doping control initiatives will recognize the selective indignation that continues to sensationalize the use of these drugs by athletes. The fact that certain groups of steroid consumers have been […]
Steroids, Sluggers, and the War on Drugs
Last week’s US congressional hearings on steroids in baseball should be seen as the dying gasp of a failed exercise in social engineering. The idea that America’s national pastime can help to remedy our social ills acquired its credibility back in the 1940s and 1950s, when Major League Baseball (MLB) finally allowed black athletes to […]
A Pharmacy on Wheels – The Tour De France Doping Scandal
In 1957 the celebrated Parisian man-of-letters Roland Barthes published a short and clever essay called “The Tour de France as Epic.” Barthes saw the Tour as a profoundly symbolic (and therefore enormously appealing) ordeal which, for the duration of the race, creates a caste of heroes and villains that for sheer theatrical effect are second […]
Mark McGwire’s Little Helper: The Androstenedione Debate
In 1935 — the year testosterone was first synthesized in the laboratory — the Food and Drug Administration established a unit to monitor the quality of the numerous “glandular” products on the market that were supposed to contain bioactive sex hormones. The only “ethical” issue addressed by this group was the possibility of consumer fraud. […]