Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Mitigating The Real Barry Bonds Effect
Yesterday was a historic day in high school athletics as the Texas Senate approved a student drug-testing program which includes randomly testing thousands of Texas high school athletes for steroids.
The program, approved on a 28-2 vote, would start in the 2007-08 school year, and it would require an estimated 22,000 student athletes to submit to steroid testing. A positive result would force the student to be suspended from competition for at least 30 days. A second positive test would sideline the student for one year, and a third would result in a permanent ban from extracurricular sports.
The decision to test high school student athletes can be viewed in both a positive and negative light. Not only does this ensure a cleaner and safer athletic environment, but students that may be tempted to try steroids will more likely shoot down such an urge for fear of failing the random test. And from a health standpoint, less students using steroids is definitely a good thing.
At the same time, it is a sad thing that the studies indicate that steroid-use is prevalent enough in high school athletics that such a test is now necessary. This really manifests the fact that our youth have seen the correlation between athletic success and steroid use. See: Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire.
More info about the testing...
Under his bill, the random tests must pick up at least 3 percent of the UIL athletes in Texas every year, and tests must be administered at no less than 30 percent of the high schools in the state. There are about 733,000 high school athletes in Texas.
This is without a doubt a great step forward in the fight to decrease the amount of performance enhancing drugs in high school locker rooms.
5 Comments:
It's too bad that this is where we have to allocate funds that should be going to improving education, but I'm glad to see that they'll be tested. As you said it especially helps for health reasons in the long run.
Steroids is awful for you and Barry Bonds is to blame for so much of these kids taking them.
I think twins said it best right there. It's unfortunate that these tests need to be brought int when the money could be useful elsewhere.
But, ofcourse, they are necessary thanks to assholes like bonds.
This is ridiculous. Are we going to start testing students for marijuana because that puts them at a disadvantage in the classroom?
I fucking hate politicians...
Excellent angle for this story. Made me think.
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