StarCaps Ruling a Win for NFL, Loss for Drug Cheats

This is a good thing, this ruling that came down Saturday in the StarCaps case. You may not see it that way if you're a fan of the Minnesota Vikings, who now face the first four games of their season without their Pro Bowl defensive tackles. Or if your team is the New Orleans Saints, who've likely lost their starting defensive ends for those first four games.

But if you're the kind of person who thinks pro athletes (and, by extension, the children who admire them) should be discouraged from taking drugs to cheat at their games, you have to look at today's development as a positive.

There are all kinds of ticklish legal issues associated with this case, and Mike Florio does a far more detailed job of breaking them down here than my liberal arts education permits. For me, this boils down to the simple idea of pro athletes trying to skirt the drug policies their unions have negotiated with their leagues, and the danger that would result if the courts began to enable them to do it.

Minnesota's Pat Williams and Kevin Williams, along with the Saints' Charles Grant and Will Smith and former Saint Deuce McAllister, were found to have violated NFL drug policy last season by testing positive for Bumetanide, a diuretic commonly used as a steroid masking agent. Per that drug policy, each player was suspended four games. But they challenged the suspensions in court, arguing that the NFL should have informed them that the StarCaps pills they were taking contained the banned substance, and their argument was persuasive enough to earn them a temporary stay of the punishment until the case was resolved.

Now, if you buy what these guys are saying, you're buying the following:

1. That it's the league's job, not that of the players, to monitor the content of every supplement an NFL player might possibly ingest, and to keep the players informed of any content that might be harmful or illegal.

2. That all five of these guys were taking a celebrity diet pill in an effort to lose weight, with no greater or more nefarious motive than that.

3. That they weren't taking anything else illegal.

We'll take those one at a time:

1. Baloney. Thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, the FDA can't monitor and regulate these supplements effectively. We should expect the NFL to pull it off?

The supplement industry is the textbook definition of "amok." Under the DHSEA, you could basically make one of these pills or powders in your basement, claim it to be anything you want and sell it in a vitamin store. You don't have to prove it's harmless, or that it contains nothing illegal, or even that it can do whatever it is you claim it can do. Your product is fine until the FDA can prove that it's harmful, at which time it can be declared illegal. If this sounds insane, take it up with Orrin Hatch. It's the law of the land, and it's spawned a shady and dangerous industry built on our society's perpetual desire to gain a physical edge.

Knowing this, it astounds me that these guys continue to take anything at all. I mean, how many times do you have to hear a story about somebody testing positive for a banned substance that just happened to be in a bottle they bought legally at GNC before you stop assuming everything you can get at GNC is okay?

Obviously, we're not dealing with the cream of the intellectual crop here. But even if you throw traditional logic and reason out the window, it's preposterous to shift the blame to the league. If you don't know what's in your supplement and you take it anyway, and you fail a drug test as a result, that's got to be on you. Next time you get stopped for speeding, try arguing that there aren't enough speed limit signs up. See how far that gets you.

2. Sure they were. And Manny Ramirez was taking female fertility drugs because he wants to be a mommy. Even if you give these guys their ignorance excuse -- even if you buy into the idea that the league should have warned them better -- you can't argue that their motives were pure. Whatever else happened, these guys are guilty of buying a bottle of something because they thought it would help them play football better than other people do -- better than they could without it. At it's core, that reason is no different from the ones Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens or Marion Jones used when they decided to inject steroids. You can make any kind of comparitive value judgment you want, but at the very bottom we know for a fact that these players, like so many others, decided to take a pill in an effort to make them better at their sport. That doesn't disqualify them from sympathy, but it doesn't mean they deserve it either.

3. Well, we can't know that, can we? What we do know is that they all tested positive for a drug that sophisticated steroid users employ as a masking agent. We know that, if successful, Bumetanide would prevent these guys from testing positive for steroids even if they had taken them. We know that pro athletes take steroids. We know that pro athletes have worked with chemists in an effort to develop new drugs that can elude drug-testing policies, and it's no great leap to assume they still are.

The players who got caught in the StarCaps case have every right to feel as if they've been denied a presumption of innocence, but what they should realize is that it's for good reason. The players who came before them, the cheaters whose actions necessitated these pro sports leagues' drug policies in the first place, are the ones responsible. It's the Rafael Palmeiros and Shawne Merrimans of the world who created a situation in which the StarCaps players can't be presumed innocent -- in which, no matter how neat a legal case they may be able to craft, we feel safe in our assumption that they're guilty as charged and probably of much worse.

For all of these reasons, zero-tolerance is the way to go here. These guys can break your hearts with their stories of I-didn't-know-it-was-illegal. But facts don't have hearts, and the fact here is that they tested positive for something the league's drug policy doesn't allow them to have in their bodies. If you start splitting hairs on that, you might as well not have a drug policy at all.

Today, the courts ruled that the NFL had the right to suspend the StarCaps players four games apiece. For the sake of anyone who thinks drugs in sports are bad, that's a good thing.