Down With Anti-Drug Witchhunt!

Let Jenrry Mejía Play!

On February 12, New York Mets pitcher Jenrry Mejía became the first player banned for life under Major League Baseball’s draconian drug policy. This was the third time Mejía tested positive for a banned performance-enhancing drug (PED), though he denied any knowledge of using prohibited anabolic steroids, as he did following his two prior suspensions. Mejía announced he will appeal—a challenge that can only be filed after a mandatory one-year waiting period and can at best result in a reduced two-year ban. So, even if he were to somehow prevail, Mejía would still be barred at least until 2018. More likely, the 26-year-old Mejía will have lost his livelihood forever. As such he will join the legions of predominantly black and Latino athletes—from the colleges, minor leagues and the major league level—who after a brief moment in the sun were thrown on the scrap heap.

As far as we’re concerned, if Mejía did knowingly use anabolic steroids, he did nothing wrong. Whether an individual uses drugs—for fun, bodybuilding or perceived enhancement of athletic ability—is a personal choice. We demand his immediate reinstatement and full restitution of back pay—with interest!

The anti-drug persecution of Mejía, a black man from the Dominican Republic, and scores upon scores of other athletes is part and parcel of the reactionary “war on drugs,” a transparent war on black people intended to regiment the population as a whole. Among the hundreds of thousands thrown into America’s dungeons for the odd toke or snort has been football stars Mercury Morris, Dexter Manley and Nate Newton, baseball’s Darryl Strawberry, Orlando Cepeda and Willie Wilson. Others who were spared prison hell, like NBA stars Mitchell Wiggins and Lewis Lloyd, were banned from pursuing their livelihood for life. The U.S. Justice Department spent ten years and millions of dollars trying to railroad Barry Bonds to prison on charges of lying to a federal grand jury about his unproven use of PEDs before finally giving up last year. The reward for the home run record holder was again to be denied entry to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

The campaign against PEDs in baseball became red hot, as Bonds and other black and Latino athletes were challenging individual records dating back to the Jim Crow era. The rationale for prohibiting PEDs echoes that for eliminating affirmative action in education—in order to provide the mythical “level playing field.” In his 2004 State of the Union address, George W. Bush denounced the use of PEDs as sending the “wrong message—that there are short cuts to accomplishment,” a sentiment echoed later by Obama who declared, “I think it tarnishes an entire era to some degree. It’s unfortunate because I think there are a lot of ball players who played it straight.” Apparently the Commanders-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism, as well as the frequently less-than-sober sports press corps, have diligently researched this issue by watching reruns of the Flubber movies of the 1960s.

In fact, users of steroids probably work harder than their counterparts—because that’s how the substances work. Anabolic steroids affect muscle mass by increasing the production of proteins. They increase strength by allowing an athlete to train harder and reduce physical recovery time. Over the course of a season, steroids like the Stanozolol that Mejía is accused of using may allow athletes to recover from minor injuries, muscle and ligament strains more rapidly—something Mejía, who underwent two elbow surgeries before the age of 24, could well appreciate. Rather than attempt to utilize these for the benefit of the athletes’ health—as well as performance—the anti-drug witchhunters launched a scare campaign (recalling the “reefer madness” and “crack baby” hysteria of bygone years) about the supposed dangers of steroids: “roid rage,” depression and suicide. However, many of the known side effects are reversible within weeks of stopping use. If PEDs are administered under medical supervision they can be perfectly safe.

Pretensions of concern for the physical and mental well-being of the athletes would be laughable were it not increasingly tragic. Barely a day goes by without news reports on the extensive early dementia, depression and suicides of retired football players. Last September, PBS’s Frontline reported on a joint Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University study of autopsies of football players, which found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in 96 percent of those who had played in the NFL. This degenerative brain disease is caused by the constant pounding they are subjected to. The team owners and the National Football League lords spent decades in cover-up and denial, putting their vast profits ahead of the players’ well-being.

Since no athlete dares admit using steroids, there is little monitoring and study by doctors and nobody knows the long-term effects. As we noted in a fuller analysis of sports and drugs:

“A rational society would both embrace the potentialities of improving human athletic performance, particularly the broader uses of anabolic steroids in muscle and tendon repair that would benefit a broad range of society, while at the same time conducting an objective scientific study of the potential medical dangers. But capitalism is not rational, and American capitalism, maintained on a bedrock of black oppression with all its commensurate racist ideology, is even less so.”

—“Baseball, Racism and Steroids: Down With the Witchhunt! Decriminalize Drugs!” WV No. 946, 6 November 2009