Why Did Texas Blow $10 Million to Catch 40 High School Steroid Users?

After over 63,000 tests, $10 million in taxpayer expenses, and all of 40 positive test results, the state of Texas is set to scrap its steroid testing program for high school athletes. The program was described as revolutionary upon its introduction in 2007, a program that would set the standard for interscholastic steroid testing and create a model for the rest of the nation to follow. According to an Amarillo Globe-News story reported in 2008, the program was "universally hailed" by Texan legislators, parents, and schools alike. Just seven years later, it's set to be defunded. What went wrong?

Texas was one of four states to begin testing high school athletes for steroids in the mid-2000s. Florida folded its $100,000 annual program after just one year, the 2008-09 school year, in which it tested 600 athletes and unearthed just one lone positive. New Jersey is continuing its own $100,000 testing program, but notched just three positives out of roughly 2,500 tests from 2005-2011, and according to the Star-Ledger, caught just three out of 495 athletes tested in the 2014 season. Illinois's program caught 12 athletes out of 1,011 tests from 2008 through 2010, but all 12 were "cleared after providing explanations to state's medical review officer," according to the Dallas News.

Steroid testing remains an extraordinarily expensive process, as each individual test costs at least $100 before accounting for procedural costs like transportation and labor. Texas has nearly 800,000 athletes, making any sort of comprehensive testing program unfeasible. The state's original $6 million investment paid for just 19,000 tests and caught just nine positives (although 60 more athletes were hit with procedural violations for skipping the test).

Dr. Don Catlin founded the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory in 1982, the United States's first testing lab, and is considered a father of modern drug testing. "It failed from the beginning," Dr. Catlin said of the the Texas program over the phone on Tuesday. "Gosh, it goes back a couple years, I told them what to do and how to do it and they paid no attention to what I said, so I'm not at all sympathetic to their problem. It just doesn't work, they didn't do it right, they did it totally wrong.

"There are dozens of problems, not the least of which they used the wrong menu, they weren't testing for the right drugs," Catlin said. "They announced it in advance. The kids knew when the testing was going to be done. It was ridiculous what they did. I don't know how much money they put into it."

I told Catlin the price tag was $10 million. His response? "Oh, good grief!"

Neither the Texas program nor the rest of the state sponsored programs could secure the rights necessary to implement an Olympic-style testing program. Most critically, state testers were not allowed to accompany athletes into the testing room during the "voiding process," making it exceptionally easy for "dirty" athletes to provide phony samples. Some states only tested athletes on playoff teams, making the testing windows predictable. The inability to create a controlled testing environment made failure inevitable.

"That's what I told them before: If they can't get their regulations correct, if they can't do surprise testing, walk in, unannounced, then it's going to fail. There's no doubt about it," Catlin said. "You have to have the rights and the privileges to do it right. If you don't have that, you shouldn't go ahead with the program. You should use something else, a volunteer program or some other approach. If you want to do it the correct way, the Olympic way, you can do that, but you're going to have to have all the approvals and I told them I doubted they were going to get the Texas high school kids and their parents to approve."

The program's advocates say the program's real value doesn't come from the number of students it catches, but rather its deterrent effect. In 2011, as Texas scaled back its program, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst told the Dallas News, "Do I believe it's helped deter use? Yes." Don Hooton, head of the Taylor Hooton Foundation and the loudest activist for the Texas testing program, told Dallas-area news station WFAA this February, "If this goes away, any semblance of a deterrent just disappears."

The reality is that whether it's high schools testing for drugs of abuse or professional sports leagues testing for performance enhancers, testing programs are often catching offenders at a far lower rate than the known usage rates of the subject populations. One Ohio school district testing for drugs of abuse pulled 11 positives from 1,473 tests (0.7 percent), another spent $65,000 to test 11,000 students and found a 0.23 percent positive rate. It is reminiscent of the NFL's total inability to catch a single HGH user in its first year testing for the hormone. HGH testing in general is a prime example—as of August 2012, 12,764 HGH tests logged by the World Anti-Doping Agency had produced all of 12 positive tests, a rate of 0.09 percent.

Valparaiso University law professor Susan Stuart is an expert on drug testing programs in schools and presented a paper titled "When the Cure Is Worse than the Disease: Student Random Drug-Testing & Its Empirical Failure" at the Symposium on The Civil Rights of Public School Students in 2010. Stuart told me over the phone Wednesday that initial efforts to drug test athletes were borne from good faith efforts to tackle a vexing drug problem. The initial programs in the 1980s were flying blind. "I think a lot of these school boards were in a defensive mode of trying to deal with some community issues," Stuart said. "The only thing they had to grasp onto was the drug testing."

The problem is that none of the available evidence suggests testing is an effective deterrent. A study called SATURN (Student Athlete Testing Using Random Notification) from 2007 studied five different high schools with random drug and alcohol testing against six control schools without such policies. SATURN's findings included that there was "no deterrent effect for 'past-month' use," and that "an implemented policy appeared to increase risk factors for future substance abuse," confirming the finding of a previous study. The researchers concluded, "More research is needed before it is considered an effective deterrent for school-based athletes."

The SATURN study looked at a wide range of drugs and alcohol. When limited to anabolic steroids, the researchers actually found an increase in use at the schools with random testing programs during the study. This confirms an observation made by PED research pioneer Lawrence Golding at Kent State University. Golding as well as many of his contemporaries found that amphetamines, the performance enhancer of choice at the time, did not improve performance, but athletes remained convinced of their beneficial qualities.

Golding was asked why so many athletes take the drugs if they aren't proven to help performance. "He finds himself prey to the need to use them," Golding responded. "because his peers are doing it and he had better do it to keep up. It's funny how athletes respond to official statements. When the IOC [International Olympic Committee] comes out against amphetamines, the athletes say, 'If they didn't do any good, why would the IOC be against it?'"

"The SATURN studies and a couple of other regulated studies done by people who were empiricists and scientists were increasingly showing that it wasn't doing any good," Stuart said. "Anecdotally, it wasn't either. Students would change their drug of choice, figure out some way of washing drugs—particularly marijuana—out of their system within 48 hours. They'd go drinking that weekend before because they weren't testing for alcohol, they were testing for something completely different." Catlin saw similar problems with what he referred to as Texas's "menu," which was testing for out-of-date drugs like Nandrolone and amphetamines rather than more recently developed PEDs.

The drug tests don't catch offenders, are exceptionally costly to the state, and their assumed deterrent effect may actually work in reverse. One of the few winners here seems to be the Center for Drug Free Sport, the beneficiary of the $10 million Texas has spent on testing. The Center for Drug Free Sport is one of the largest testing companies in the country, as it boasts contracts with MLB, the PGA Tour, and the NCAA. The Taylor Hooton Foundation has been winning, too. According to its public 990 tax forms, the foundation has been pulling in at least $700,000 per year since 2008 and has paid out over half of that revenue in salaries and wages.

Still, drug testing remains compelling for administrators and legislators alike. It's a well-established way for governments and schools to combat drug use. It directs responsibility away from parents and onto the community. Drug testing companies will push for it whenever they can. And despite the lack of evidence for its deterrent properties, many still have faith. Even though in many cases the cost of hiring a drug counselor or paying for an educational program would actually cost less than testing, such non-adversarial approaches can be seen as soft or ineffective.

"Oftentimes what it seems to boil down to, and the problem with those programs is, we don't have any evidence to show whether they work either, because we're always behind the curve on these things," Stuart said. "We've been living it for 20 years under the drug testing regimen, which we now have evidence doesn't work, but what else is going to work? It's always going to be an experiment. You're always trying to keep two steps ahead of the kids and you're always going to be 14 steps behind."

Catlin did not know of anyone who has enacted the kind of voluntary entry program he advocates. "I wish I did," he said. "People are talking about it. It takes time to realize with these non-voluntary programs, it takes a year or two to figure out they're not working, and then they start to look around." At the very least, with the failure of the Texas program, states now realize these programs aren't worth the price tag. Florida canceled its program after one year, and Illinois's lasted only two. Delaware opted for an educational program over testing, and Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association Executive Director Kevin Charles told me in an e-mail Tuesday, "The main reason was it didn't appear to be cost effective."

Although the Texas steroid program was particularly poorly designed and implemented, these problems exist in many mandatory random drug testing environments. Programs that exist solely to catch and punish users create incentives to hide drug use rather than seek help, particularly at the high school level, where family issues can be a significant factor. The tests are often easy to beat, and once implemented, users simply switch to the next drug outside the test parameters. Knowing what we know now, implementing a random testing program is nothing but throwing money at a problem and hoping it goes away.

"I'm a lawyer, I like to see evidence," Stuart said. "I was always perturbed by these random drug tests, particularly because of the flip way with which the Supreme Court was treating the rights of children. Young adults up to the age of 18. They're doing it in the schools, creating this adversarial position, when what you need to be doing is getting these kids into rehab or getting them the help they need."

Ten million dollars later, hopefully Texas lawmakers understand that now.