On March 22, 2005, Joan Ryan wrote this commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Steroids? Alcohol is the Real Problem
Commentary by Joan Ryan
Reprinted from the San Francisco Chronicle, March 17, 2005


Congressman Tom Davis claims straight out that steroids are a public

health crisis. That is why he and his colleagues on the House Government

Reform Committee have gone to the trouble of summoning some of the biggest

stars in baseball to Capitol Hill to testify today. It's about -- all

together now -- protecting our children.

OK. Let's say the motive for this steroids hearing is, in fact, about

protecting America's kids from the harmful influence of sports leagues

that care only about boosting ticket sales and TV ratings. Then I imagine

we can expect a big ballyhooed hearing soon on the substance that is most

glorified by sports leagues and kills more kids every year than every

other drug combined.

Alcohol.

No single industry promotes the consumption of alcohol among teenagers as

much as college and professional sports.

Nebraska Republican Rep. Tom Osborne knows a bit about college and

professional sports. He played for the 49ers, then coached the University

of Nebraska football team for 36 years. He says that during all those

years on the Nebraska campus, he dealt with only three students who abused

steroids -- and thousands who abused alcohol.

"Probably 85 to 90 percent of the negative incidents on campus, whether

dealing with players or other students, were in some way related to

alcohol,'' Osborne said by phone from Washington, D.C. "About 70,000

sexual assaults each year are related to alcohol, and 500,000 injuries.

"We have justifiable anxiety over 1,500 (American) deaths in Iraq of a

two-year period, but alcohol kills 1,400 college students annually.''

That, said Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., of the House Government Reform

Committee, is a public health crisis.

Osborne will be calling upon the National Collegiate Athletic Association

to ban alcohol commercials from all radio and TV broadcasts of the "March

Madness'' NCCA basketball tournament, which starts today.

"Colleges and universities continue to take money from beer companies

whose ads glamorize drinking and target a youthful audience,'' Osborne

said. "They're sending very mixed messages to their students, because

every college president will tell you that the No. 1 problem on their

campus is alcohol.''

The 1,400 college students who die each year from alcohol-related injuries

translates to three or four students every single day. Try to find any

reputable research that says steroids has killed a single child. There

isn't any. Several suicides have been linked to steroid use, but as tragic

as they are, they do not constitute a public health crisis. The numbers of

kids using steroids in the U.S. barely registers on the scale of teen drug

use. In a 1999 study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2.7 percent

of 8th- and 10th-graders and 2.9 percent of 12th-graders had taken

steroids.

By contrast, 80 percent of high school seniors have used alcohol; 32

percent say they had been drunk in the last month. About 3 million teens

are said to be alcoholics.

Baseball's unwillingness to acknowledge its role in glamorizing steroids,

however unintentional that promotion might be, is nothing compared to its

unwillingness to acknowledge its role -- and the entire sporting world's

role -- in glamorizing alcohol.

Nearly 1,000 alcohol commercials aired in 2002 during the telecasts of the

Super Bowl, the World Series, college football bowl games and the National

Football League's Monday Night Football broadcasts, according to the

Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth. College sports games showed 4,747

commercials for alcohol in 2003.

Every time a kid tunes in to a March Madness game the next two weeks, he

or she will see an average of four advertisements of attractive young

people having a great time drinking. By year's end, this one kid will see

about 245 such ads. Indeed, teenagers see more ads for alcoholic drinks

than for fruit juices and fruit-flavored drinks. When researchers from

Teenage Research Unlimited in 2002 asked teens to choose their favorite

commercials, more named commercials for Budweiser than for any other

brand, including Pepsi and Nike.

But it's not only television commercials that associate sports with

alcohol. Kids see enormous Bud ads on scoreboards at stadiums. They see

Coors as the official name of the Colorado Rockies ballpark. Down the road

from Capitol Hill, they see promotions for Smirnoff Ice and Captain

Morgan's Gold products in the Washington Redskins' stadium and on

television during Redskins broadcasts. They see Crown Royal as the

official sponsor of auto racing's International Race of Champions. The

list goes on.

The money and power the alcohol industry wield are enormous, something

Osborne has learned first-hand. In 2003, when a landmark National Academy

of Sciences report to Congress concluded that underage drinking costs the

United States $52 billion a year, he co-sponsored a bill that would have

funded new efforts to prevent kids from drinking. The bill failed even to

reach the House floor, thanks to vigorous lobbying against it.

The National Beer Wholesalers Association is the fifth-highest spender of

all political action committees in Washington. (Its director is a close

friend of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.) The alcohol industry spent

$10,164,916 last year in Washington to promote its products.

Last month, Osborne and his co-sponsors reintroduced the "STOP Underage

Drinking'' bill. It is fairly tepid, frankly, falling far short of calling

for a ban on alcohol advertising from sports telecasts that children are

likely to be watching. But its passage is as unlikely today as it was last

year and the year before.

"You're swimming upstream,'' Osborne said of fighting Big Alcohol.

Even the House Government Reform Committee concedes that no legislation

will come out of today's steroids hearing. Steroids are already illegal

without a prescription. Baseball already is moving, however slowly, toward

a stricter drug policy. What, then, is the point of Congress devoting an

entire workday and hauling in baseball stars and executives?

A hearing about sports and alcohol would mean a parade of parents and

experts testifying about drunken driving accidents, violence, rape, unsafe

sex, suicide, educational failures and crime. It would mean a photo

exhibit of the 1,400 college students lost last year to alcohol. Such

powerful testimony surely would put pressure on Congress to do something

about it.

And that is why the hearing today is about steroids.

Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Reprinted with permission from the San Francisco Chronicle, March 17,

2005, page B1.

http://www.jointogether.org/y/0,2521,576504,00.html