Slated for publication in September under the Skyhorse imprint, the book’s working title is “BALCO: The Straight Dope on Barry Bonds, Marion Jones and What We Can Do To Save Sports.” Conte, in conjunction with co-author Nathan Jendrick, promises to share “the dirt, the drugs, the doses, the names, dates and places, and a ‘prescription’ for a brighter future.”
He promises the “complete truth in its honest, unadulterated and raw form” and says he is “ready to tell the world everything.”
David Soares is a political fraud ostensibly promising drug law reform while expanding the costly war on drugs in a different direction. He was elected to the office of the Albany County District Attorney running on a platform seeking to repeal New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. Many progressive anti-prohibition organizations fell in love with his rhetoric. To Soare’s credit, his campaign was influential in the passage of minor Rockefeller drug law reforms although critics have charged that the changes do not represent real reform.
Prosecutor David Soares continues to strongly criticize the U.S. war on drugs as an abysmal failure. His 2006 speech at the International Harm Reduction Association conference in Vancouver, where he warned Canada to stay as far away from U.S. drug policy as possible, earned him praise from drug law reformers.
Yet at the same time Soares was criticizing the failure of the ”war on drugs”, he was aggressively invigorating the nation’s “war on steroids“; he abandoned his efforts to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws in favor of a costly steroid witch hunt. The inescapable hypocrisy of David Soares’ actions suggest a political opportunist who lacks a principled stance on drug law reform
The California Milk Processor Board (CMPB), better known as the producers of the “Got Milk?” campaigns, has decided to re-release two of the five “Got Milk?” spoofs of the steroids in baseball scandal. This was timed to take advantage of the heightened media coverage and public awareness resulting from the recent allegations of steroid use by MLB baseball players in the Mitchell Report. Read the rest of this entry »
If anyone thinks that the federal government, the anti-doping authorities, and the media have made an example out of the person who many consider to be architect of the largest anabolic steroid scandal in sports history, think again.
Victor Conte (owner of BALCO) bought a new silver Bentley Continental GT this year, his SNAC business is bringing in $300,000 a month, and some of his best customers are still major league baseball players.
I’ve recently discussed the role of the media and particularly the contextual internet ads from Google as having a big role in his success. Victor Conte attests to the power of contextual ads in the July 2007 issue of Muscular Development magazine:Read the rest of this entry »
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). Read the rest of this entry »
HBO Films is planning to make a movie about Barry Bonds and all the characters involved in the BALCO steroid scandal. They recently purchased the rights to the book “Game of Shadows” written by the investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Hollywood is already promoting this as a “Barry Bonds” movie. I think everyone will be overloaded with stories about Bonds, if not already, by the time the movie is released on HBO. How many people will really want to see a movie about Barry Bonds?
Game of Shadows is well-written and interesting book that is about much more than Barry Bonds. I hope that director Ron Shelton is able to breathe life into movie adaption with an engaging depiction of the BALCO steroid scandal. I am hopeful as he has had some notable success with sports films: Read the rest of this entry »