BASEBALL MUST TAKE FIRM STAND AGAINST STEROIDS, DRUGS

Emphatically, Major League Baseball should ban all performance-enhancing
drugs, should institute random testing both in and out of season, should
enforce harsh penalties for violations. If the players' union refuses to go
along, Commissioner Bud Selig should invoke his authority to act in the
best interests of the sport and unilaterally enact the no-drug policy.
Absent that, many members of the U.S. Congress sound like they're all too
eager to intervene.

All of this comes in the wake of formal revelations - as if many folks
didn't already have an inkling - that many players, among them some of the
game's best, have used steroids and/or other production-boosting
substances. That is cheating, of course. It is a stain on the careers of
those players, including Barry Bonds, and on the national pastime.

While some will raise the issue of individual privacy rights here, the very
integrity of the game is at stake when there is doubt about whether its
participants are mere mortals or chemically sculptures of such. When the
outcomes are not determined honestly, baseball becomes the equivalent of
professional wrestling. This doping scandal is every bit the threat to the
game that gambling was in a previous century. Baseball's rules in this
regard are far less stringent than in other sports which do take cheating
seriously.

Fans deserve better, among them the kids who look up to these players as
role models. The players who don't cheat, which is the overwhelming
majority, deserve better. The transgressors should get some compassion
along with their condemnation, too. Far too little attention has been paid
to the long-term health ramifications of using steroids or human growth
hormone or amphetamines or whatever. A little glory now for a lot of
potential grief later isn't worth the trade-off. That's another reason to
call for tough policing.

Of course, making these drugs illegal and coming up with some enforcement
mechanism are the easy parts. (Baseball should strongly consider handing
its drug screening and sanctioning program over to the United States
Anti-Doping Agency, as the U.S. Olympic Committee did in 2000, in order to
remove all suspicion of favoritism and to keep up with advances in
technology, particularly genetic engineering.) The hard part is determining
what should happen to those players who are suspected of, or have
acknowledged, using these drugs.

Should they face suspensions or expulsion, costing them millions? Should
their teams be able to cancel their contracts? Should they be put on some
sort of probation that requires them to confess their sins and warn young
people of the dangers and consequences of drug use? Should an asterisk
accompany their achievements in the record book? Those questions deserve
debate, but they also raise some other problematic issues.

Some players have come forward and come clean and others have not, so
punishment would not be even-handed. No one can be guilty of violating drug
policies that didn't exist, and until the last couple of years, they
largely haven't existed in Major League Baseball. We suspect that many
teams looked the other way when one of their players added pounds and
pounds of muscle virtually overnight and his statistics skyrocketed. So
long as he was hitting home runs and putting rumps in the seats, why ask
uncomfortable questions? There is plenty of blame to go around here. We
don't see how conducting a witch hunt would be productive. The harsh
judgments of history will be their own punishment, and should be, for these
players.

So draw the line in the sand right here, right now. Given what is now known
and no longer speculation, there can be no excuse for indifference.