Commentary: Confessions of a former deca smuggler

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Yet again, Congress is staging a photo-op under the pretense of protecting the game of baseball from evil steroid users.

There are so many wonderful things they could be doing, like repealing the Sherman Act, or the minimum wage, or the National Labor Relations Act, or the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards.

But no. They want to spend millions of dollars hounding old men for taking steroids back in the 90s.

In the interest of saving taxpayer money, and encouraging Congress to do something more important, like repealing farm subsidies, I’m going to write this column for the members of Congress, telling them everything they need to know.

First, steroids work. Really well.

Second, for years, the baseball players union successfully managed to prevent any type of testing for steroids, even though everyone knew that they were ubiquitous.

Third, I’m a middle-aged lawyer, yet I can still get steroids if I want them at the drop of a hat. And there is no moral opprobrium attached to steroid use, even in my social circles. We say, “Matt is juicing again,” with as much indifference as we’d say, “I fertilized the lawn this weekend.”

You can imagine how little opprobrium there was toward steroid use in a subculture of athletes getting, or hoping to get, millions of dollars for playing baseball.

Fourth, steroids are really easy to get, or at least they were then. Here’s how we used to do it, back in the 80s.

You walk into a building marked “pharmacia” in a Mexican border town (since this missive is intended for members of Congress, I guess I should explain that “pharmacia” is Spanish for “pharmacy”).

You write down “deca durabolin” on a piece of paper, followed by a number. Deca durabolin is a very effective steroid, with few side effects. For that reason, it’s the first steroid that the drug testing people look for. Many users take steroids that are less effective and far more dangerous than deca because it’s so easily detected.

A clerk brings you a big stack of sealed needles already containing the drug, and you pay for them. You also buy a roll of masking tape. Then you find a secluded place to pull down your pants and tape all the syringes to your legs.

Now, here’s the most important part: you buy a bottle of tequila. Then, when Mr. Immigration Man asks whether you bought anything on your trip to Mexico, you shove the bottle in his face and declare, “Yeah! I bought this bottle of tequila for only $3! It would cost me $12 back in Wisconsin!”

“Keep moving, idiot,” says the customs man, and just like that, you just smuggled thousands of dollars of top quality anabolic steroids into the United States of America.

In a nutshell, this is all anyone in Congress needs to know about steroids and baseball: steroids are valuable; there were no mechanisms in place to prevent their use; there was no moral stigma attached to their use; and they were really easy to get.

The resulting use was as predictable and inevitable as Congressmen buying votes with pork barrel projects.

So here is my plea to Congress: leave these middle-aged jocks alone, and go do something useful, like repealing the corporate income tax.