On Friday, Alex Rodriguez will meet in Buffalo, N.Y., with federal investigators. They'd like to know about A-Rod's involvement with Anthony Galea, the blood-spinning doctor whose assistant was stopped at the Canadian border with a car full of human growth hormone. Whatever the feds suspect, my own suspicion is that we're all about to repeat the death spiral of statistical stupidity that has characterized the past decade of debate about steroids.
Here's the pattern: Amateurs -- some of them genuinely talented researchers, some of them hucksters (and some both) -- get ahead of established science and the law in coming up with ways to enhance athletes' performance. They get a new breed of chemicals into gyms, then out into the worlds of baseball, football and track and field. Authorities get wind of what's happening and try to crack down. Commissioners and sports writers grow outraged, kicking up storms of indignation that obscure any analysis of how (or whether) the new drug actually works or should be regulated. Some but only some users end up getting torched, while others go further underground, leaving everyone morally queasy about the whole process, yet scientifically unenlightened. This is what happened with the first generation of anabolics, and again with designer steroids in the BALCO era, and it's happening again with growth hormone.
Understandably, many libertarian types want to throw up their hands at this process and adopt a more live-and-let-shoot-up approach. Economist J.C. Bradbury of Sabernomics, for example, has advocated legalizing HGH for several years, and repeats that call in the latest issue of ESPN The Magazine. "Prohibition," he writes, "is the best advertising an HGH pusher can ask for."
But that's a terrible idea.
