Drug Testing US Student-Athletes for Performance-Enhancing Substance Misuse: A Flawed Process

Abstract

The author argues that drug testing of U.S. high school students for performance-enhancing substance misuse is invasive, expensive, and the low number of positive test results do not justify the costs, especially in financially strapped school districts where this money would be better spent on injury prevention for athletes and the education of all students.

Keywords:

• drug testing
• performance-enhancing substances
• student-athletes

Notes

¹ The journal's style utilizes the category substance abuse as a diagnostic category. Substances are used or misused; living organisms are and can be abused. Editor's note.

² The interested reader is referred to materials about two relevant processes which continue to interfere with effective intervention planning, implementation and assessment, when, and if, it is actually needed. These are inattentional blindness, not seeing what actually exists, but is not perceived, and therefore is not considered, and misdirection, which involves how attention is manipulated, are powerful ongoing processes. Mack, A. and Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional Blindness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; www.theinvisiblegorilla.com. The second process has been labeled the “black swan,” and is an unlikely, unexpected event which has major effects - the wasting of limited human and non-human resources - and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact. N. N., (2007) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. NYC: Random House.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael S. Bahrke

Michael S. Bahrke, BS, MS, PhD, US, master's degree in exercise physiology and a doctorate in sport psychology. Currently a consultant with Health, Fitness, and Wellness, Ellison Bay, WI, USA. Bahrke has been an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, director of research for the US Army Physical Fitness School, fitness area coordinator at the University of Wisconsin, and project director for a National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded anabolic steroid research grant in the School of Public Health, Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Authored and co-authored more than 80 scientific publications and has made presentations at numerous scientific meetings, including the International Conference on the Abuse and Trafficking of Anabolic Steroids, sponsored by the US Drug Enforcement Administration; the American Psychological Association; and the American Psychiatric Association. He is an associate editor for Substance Use and Misuse and an ad hoc reviewer for over two dozen scientific journals, and co-editor of Performance-Enhancing Substances in Sport and Exercise (Human Kinetics, 2002); was an acquisition editor in the scientific, technical, and medical division of Human Kinetics Publishing.