IRS Special Agent Jeff Novitsky has been transferred to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Office of Criminal Investigations as a special agent to give him greater freedom to focus on anabolic steroid-related investigations (“No Longer With I.R.S., Novitzky Joins F.D.A.,” April 23).

In regards to Novitzky’s new job, Dwight Sparlin, a retired I.R.S. manager who led the San Francisco office when the Balco case started nearly six years ago, said he had been hearing for two weeks that Novitzky was going to the F.D.A. to continue focusing on drug cases.

“I think it would give him more exposure to just doing that type of work,” Sparlin said by telephone Tuesday. He added: “For Jeff to go as far as he did in Balco was a stretch for the I.R.S., too. I think he was allowed to go a lot further than he would otherwise because of the impact.”

Jeff Novitsky has been involved in almost every aspect of the BALCO steroid scandal and steroids in baseball investigation.

(Hat tip to Steroid Nation for the story.)

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Track sprinter LaTasha Jenkins is the first athlete to win a doping case against the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). She was charged with an adverse analytical finding after testing positive for the anabolic steroid nandrolone in both Sample A and Sample B in July 2006. She was banned from competition for two years. Last week, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) dropped its appeal of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) decision which exonerated her (“LaTasha Jenkins first athlete to beat the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency on a doping charge,” April 22).

A three-member arbitration panel ruled last December the testing of her sample, given at a meet in Belgium, was not done in accordance with WADA rules that require tests be run by two different technicians.

That broke USADA’s perfect record in front of arbitration panels, which was 35-0 according to the best available statistics.

To the question of Jenkins’ appearing to have won on a technicality, Valparaiso Sports Law Clinic director Michael Straubel had said, “[The arbitrators] set aside the test results because they were not based on reliable lab results.”

She was represented by the Valpo Sports Law Clinic with free legal assistance. The clinic is a pro bono service of Valparaiso University School of Law based on financial need. The Valpo Sports Clinic was founded in 2005; the clinic will have an on-site service for athletes at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Professor Michael Straubel, the Director of the Valpo Sports Law Clinic, has previously commented on the unfairness and inconsistency of anti-doping efforts in the context of the Floyd Landis case (“Sports Law Clinic director comments on Landis case,” May 24, 2007).

“It is important to eliminate cheating in sports and enforce anti-doping rules consistently and fairly, but the USADA v. Landis hearing is a rare public airing of the many tensions and growing pains that haunt the doping control process,” said Professor Straubel. “Those tensions include a bureaucracy that needs to prove itself vs. an accused athlete’s need for information to defend himself. The system is designed to be quick vs. the need to be thorough in order to be fair. It is a system based on breach of contract dispute procedures vs. claims and charges that are criminal in their seriousness.”

Professor Straubel added, “However, at the heart of the Landis case are questions about the reliability of a still developing science and anti-doping enforcement using that science. Floyd Landis and his attorneys are challenging a system which presumes the science is reliable and testing is properly done, but which then limits the information available to athletes about that science and testing. This challenge has clearly shown how difficult it is to put the testers to their proofs. Perhaps the larger result of the Landis case will be a system that is more self correcting and reliable.”

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The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) has been conducting a formerly secret pilot program for longitudinal testing for anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. USADA recruited twelve U.S. athletes for voluntary participation in “Project Believe.” News of the anti-doping program was leaked when decathlon champion Brian Clay and runner Allyson Felix discussed it at a press conference possibly violating USADA’s code of secrecy on the program (“US sports stars try to dim doping fears with ‘Project Believe’,” April 17).

“I may get in trouble for talking about it but I want people to know I’m doing everything in my power to stay clean,” said Clay, who began having extra tests done before last month’s world indoor championships.

In spite of Clay’s concerns, it is unlikely that Clay or Felix will face any sanctions by USADA for revealing the existence of “Project Believe” prior to its official launch.

Trust But Verify believes the “Project Believe” trial is based of cycling’s bio-passport program. The expensive nature, the importance of establishing a physiological baseline, and the frequency of urine and blood tests over time seem to confirm the similarities with cycling’s longitudinal testing programs (“Anti-doping program takes root,” April 17).

The project, according to athletes and antidoping officials familiar with it, aims to compile a physiological baseline of each of the initial 12 volunteers. Subsequent tests would be compared to the baseline numbers to see whether there are any changes that could be attributed to doping…

In one three-week period, [Clay] he said he was subjected to six blood and urine tests, with five vials of blood taken for each of the blood tests. Some of the tests were pre-planned, but others were surprises, he said.

Don Catlin believes athletes who do not use banned substances will eagerly embrace this new anti-doping system.

Don Catlin, an anti-doping expert and one of the foremost authorities on longitudinal testing, said the theory behind the USADA project is solid, a “much more powerful technique than simply taking one slice in time.”

“It’s no surprise that good athletes, clean athletes, will jump up and down for this thing,” Catlin said. “That’s great. It’s about time they started doing something. So now, it’s ‘OK, it’s here, it’s now.’ And I’m sure there are going to be issues about how to get on the program.”

Details on the cost of such testing have not yet been revealed.

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Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have modified a bill that would have added human growth hormone (HGH) to the Controlled Substances List. The bill was introduced as a kneejerk reaction to revelations of widespread HGH use in professional baseball. But in the end, legislators avoided making the same mistake with HGH as they did with anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) with the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990. (“HGH bill altered to help children,” April 16)

Senators Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have dropped language in the bill that would have put HGH on the same legal plane as anabolic steroids, a move that would have severely limited access to the synthetic hormone.

For example, under the bill’s original language, HGH would not have been widely available through the mail and would not have been available in longer than six-month supplies. Because doctors specializing in childhood growth disorders often are far from patients, such controls could have caused hardship for families with children using the drug.

The atmosphere of steroid hysteria resulted in overwhelming bipartisan support for the original HGH bill practically guaranteeing passage of the legislation. When it comes to steroids and performance enhancing drugs, it appears that emotional arguments generally trump intellectual arguments. But fortunately, and surprisingly, the Sen. Schumer and Sen. Grassley rationally examined the evidence of the adverse consequences, particularly for children, of making HGH a Scheduled-III controlled substance. 

“We’ve ran into some things that we didn’t anticipate. We were enlightened by the parents whose children legitimately need HGH,” Grassley told USA TODAY on Tuesday. “Making it (a more tightly controlled substance) would have created a lot of red tape for them.”

Sadly, Sen. Schumer and Sen. Grassley are not students of history when it comes to the Controlled Substances Act; otherwise, they would already known how political misuse of the Controlled Substances Act (especially involving doping in sports) can adversely affect availability of pharmaceuticals for patients who needs these therapies for health, wellness, and survival. The addition of anabolic steroids to the Controlled Substances List with the Anabolic Steroids Control Act of 1990 had adverse unintended consequences for untold numbers of patients who had legitimate medical indications requiring anabolic steroid treatment.

We can thank Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) and Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), who were widely criticized for doing so at the time, for placing a temporary hold on the original HGH legislation thereby allowing reason to prevail over emotion in the Senate. But most credit should go to the MAGIC Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to “providing support services to the families of children afflicted with chronic and critical disorders, syndromes, and diseases that affect their growth,” for their activism in the matter.

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Dr. Gary Gaffney from Steroid Nation posted an article on Huffington Post about the performance enhancing effects of human growth hormone. Gaffney responds to so-called experts who assert with certainty that growth hormone does not help performance in sports. As Lou Schuler stated in a recent post, the true effects of growth hormone on performance are not always empirically “knowable and measurable.”

Gaffney takes note of the lack of empirical research examining the performance enhancing effects of drugs that has historically resulted in mainstream medical organizations failing to recognize performance enhancing drugs. Given this along with results seen in “experiments of nature,” Gaffney feels it is reasonable to conclude that GH has performance enhancing effects:

Consider that until 1984, testosterone — now the paragon of a PED — was not labeled a PED by the American Academy of Sports Medicine. Consider that most PED studies look at ‘weekend warriors’ and not elite world class athletes. And consider that no scientist has studied the effect of any PED on home run production in a double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over pharmacological study. Considering all these points, saying PEDs affect MLB home-runs — or any athletic task — constitutes a classic inductive leap. But a reasonable conclusion in my view.

Gaffney discusses the importance of syngergism in the use of performance enhancing drugs. Bodybuilders have long recognized and exploited the synergism amongst various combinations of anabolic steroids, growth hormone and other peptides, and other performance enhancing drugs and have coined the term “stacking” to describe it. But Gaffney is one of the few doctors I’ve seen that has appreciated the concept of synergy in the context of PEDs in baseball and other sports outside of bodybuilding.

In the complex physiological milieu that constitutes human biology, hormones like HGH do not act alone. Neurotransmitters, hormones, growth factors, and other biochemicals act in concert with a multiplicity of biological variables to produce behavior, performance, emotions, and the other functions that we call life…

Many experts contend that HGH by itself my not increase strength or athletic performance. However, athletes take the drug in combination with anabolic steroids, thyroid hormone, insulin, IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor), and other ‘stacked’ PEDs. The effects of these drugs appears to be synergistic…

Experts on metabolism and endocrinology suggest that androgenic hormones modulate the response to HGH — ie. a synergistic effect. The response to HGH becomes even more complicated because another hormone IGF-1 may actually be performing much of the cellular dirty-work for HGH.

In 1999, my friend Bryan Haycock wrote a groundbreaking article on the synergism between growth hormone, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), insulin, thyroid, and anabolic-androgenic steroids.  The lengthy series offers incredible insight in the synergy of performance enhancing drugs.

In the first installment of this series we discussed the mechanism by which human growth hormone (GH) exerts its anabolic effects in the body. We also discussed the important role of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) in the anabolic properties of GH. In part two we discussed the role of androgens in GH secretion and sensitivity in a hypothetical pharmacological regimen aimed at dramatically increasing skeletal muscle growth. Based on research looking at the effects of androgens on GH secretion and IGF-1 sensitivity, it was deduced that the testosterone esters should provide the most potent anabolic stimulus compared to other androgens, especially those that do not aromatize. Now, in the final installment, we shall look at the feasibility of using GH, IGF-1, Insulin, and perhaps tri-iodothyronine (T3) to enhance the anabolic properties of androgens.

Athletes, particularly bodybuilders, will always be far ahead of the scientific community when it comes to experimentation with performance enhancing drugs. Bodybuilders usually are the first to establish trends in the types of anabolic drugs used and the manner in which they are used. The body of knowledge amonst bodybuilders continues to advance through real world trial and error.

There is no prohibition on performance enhancing drugs in bodybuilding which completely eliminates the ethical considerations faced by researchers and physicians and even athletes subjected to doping controls. As a result, anyone who wants to learn about performance enhancing drugs just needs to investigate bodybuilding to learn what is on the leading edge.

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Sylvester Stallone has apparently endorsed anti-steroid crusader John McCain for President. Sylvester Stallone has been using his Rambo promotional tour to advocate growth hormone and testosterone in age management medicine. Senator John McCain is well-known for his anti-steroid grandstanding in Congress. Nonetheless, Senator McCain’s positive reaction to the endorsement was priceless as seen on Fox & Friends stating “I’m going to Philadelphia and running up the steps.”

Senator McCain has expressed his disappointment with Roger Clemens’ alleged use of anabolic steroids and growth hormone, but that is probably only because Clemens has not endorsed him.

It is unlikely that Sylvester Stallone is endorsing John McCain based on his record as an anti-steroid crusader. Sly is apparently not a single issue voter. There has been some serious discussion in the blogosphere about Stallone’s endorsement of McCain and his political leanings based on his Rambo franchise.

Matt Zoller Seitz believes the Rambo franchise is the most “unabashedly right wing in its world view” than any blockbuster action series.

Cowritten and directed by Stallone, the fourth Rambo movie is a bracingly political picture — as much an argument in movie form as No End In Sight; a pro-interventionist rebuttal to all the 2007 documentaries and dramas about America losing bits of its soul in Iraq. The I-word is never spoken in Rambo, yet in its coded way, the film makes a case for why we are in Iraq and should stay there until the job is done, whenever that may be.

Seitz offers an insightful review of Rambo and the Rambo franchise:

[Rambo has] a sharp pro-interventionist flavor. Arriving five years into America’s occupation of Iraq, on the cusp of a presidential election that could determine whether the U.S. stays indefinitely or leaves as soon as possible, its timing is impeccable. It’s a Stay the Course movie, an inspirational blood-and-guts action flick whose message seems aimed equally at the portion of the American left that wants to see democracy spread, but not in this way, and that supposedly has no stomach for war; and that growing sector of the American right that views Iraq as noble crusade led by incompetents.

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The Steroid Nation blog has some very insightful commentary by Jürgen Kalwa, a journalist for the German national newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, on the recent Humanplasma Lab doping scandal. It seemed to me that the recent German reporting, lawsuits, apologies, and financial conflicts of interest were problematic for arriving at the truth in the Humanplasma Lab case. Kalwa discusses Germany’s unique relationship with doping and the threats to independent journalism when it comes to covering doping scandals.

But those confessions also pointed towards another element of the wide-ranging cheating scandal: the duplicity of sports journalists, especially in public television, which is funded by a system of mandatory monthly fees every German with a TV set has to pay. Their commentators had long abandoned their role as independent reporters, but had evolved into cheerleaders chasing after high ratings. Only after the debacle of last year’s Tour de France, ARD, one of the two large public television channels, installed a special doping team and gave them free reign to chase the bad guys. Hajo Seppelt became the man in charge.

Hajo Seppelt’s team was responsible for breaking the news story of the Vienna lab involved in blood doping. But his journalistic independence seems to be threatened by a variety of sources, including the Russian Mafia.

The situation is threatening the reputation of a journalist, who for years had been the only German TV reporter to actively pursue leads and stories about doping. While he insists that he has clear indications that Human Plasma practiced “blood doping in the style of Eufemiano Fuentes”, the Spanish doctor well-known for his stable of cycling clients, he still wants to protect his sources. “Russians and Ukrainian mafia members are behind this”, he said according to a report in German news daily Die Welt. “Fear [is] a constant companion.”

Source: Steroid Nation

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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is once again going to be confronted with his own admitted use of anabolic steroids as a former professional bodybuilder with his promotion of the 2008 Arnold Classic Bodybuilding contest in Columbus next month. This has become an annual ritual with the steroid-addicted media and it is sure to continue as long as Arnold is in politics and continues his involvement in the sport of professional bodybuilding.

But there may be further attention given to Schwarzenegger and his relationship, past and present, with anabolic steroids. Sources tell the Steroid Report that the steroid documentary “Bigger, Stronger, Faster”, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this month, will be highly critical of his conflicted positions on anabolic steroids.

Documentaries have not been kind to Arnold Schwarzenegger this month. I posted news of the sensationalistic and offensive documentary called ”Running with Arnold” that was released in theatres this week in California.

I expect it could get worse for Arnold if we see Jeff Novitsky snooping around the 2008 Arnold Sports festival in Columbus!

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Google has made millions of dollars from companies selling steroids through Google’s contextual ad service. But Google was assisted by mainstream news outlets like NYTimes.com and CNN.com who displayed the ads offering “steroids for sale.”

Michael Arrington recently commented on this at TechCrunch:

The problem with automated advertising on news sites has always been the placing of inappropriate ads next to serious news issues.

Many news/media websites posted editorials complaining about the dangers of anabolic steroids and the role of the internet in facilitating steroid sales only to provide links for consumers to buy steroids (and receive payment from Google for displaying those links).

Most of the ads shown recently are not for real pharmaceutical anabolic steroids (although some ads still slip through) but OTC supplements with names that sound like steroids. Google has actually made efforts to prevent advertisers from selling steroids using their service that seem to more effective that efforts at YouTube at preventing piracy.

Victor Conte of BALCO likely made millions promoting ZMA through Google Ads. Mainstream news services published countless stories about his involvement in the recent sports steroids scandals not to mention stories about his star client, Barry Bonds. The countless stories surely provided considerable ad revenue for news sites offering coverage of the BALCO scandal courtesy Victor Conte (via Google Ads).

Another example of how all publicity is good publicity (and very profitable in some cases).

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Several months ago, Bill Llewellyn and Rick Collins told me about an independent filmmaker that was interested in hearing their perspective on the “steroid issue”; Chris Bell patiently spent several hours with each of them for on camera interviews. They had a good feeling about the film he was making finally hoping to see a truthful examination of anabolic steroids in society appear on the big screen.

I had the opportunity to meet Chris Bell, the director and screenwriter of “Bigger, Stronger, Faster,” at the 2007 Ironman Pro Expo in Pasadena thanks to an introduction from my good friend Rehan Jalali. After talking with Chris, I could understand why so many people were excited by this film. Clearly, Chris was striving for an open and honest examination of steroids free of the hysteria that is so commonplace nowadays. The irony is that it is most likely this same hysteria that makes financing of such independent documentaries possible.

I was happy to see that Bigger, Stronger, Faster was selected as one of one of 16 films (from 953 submissions) screening in the Sundance Film Festival Documentary Competition on January 17-27, 2008, in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Sundance, Utah.

Bigger, Faster, Stronger (Director: Christopher Bell; Screenwriters: Christopher Bell, Alexander Buono, Tamsin Rawady) – A filmmaker explores America’s win-at-all-cost culture by examining his two brothers’ steroids use… and his own.

This should be good

http://www.sundance.org/festival/press_industry/releases/2008_films_in_competition.asp

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