Sports Drug Testing At Schools
The Salt Lake Tribune has written a detailed investigative article about sports drug testing at schools. The journalists requested information from 119 schools and received responses from 79 schools. Some 67 percent of the schools reported that some athletes had tested positive for certain drugs, mostly marijuana, since 2004. Only thirty percent of the schools conducted random drug testing.
To examine the scope and effectiveness of the institutional drug-testing programs, The Tribune requested information from all 119 colleges and universities that sponsor football and compete in Division I-A, as well as from three lower-division universities in Utah. The newspaper solicited the information from public schools through open-records requests, while private institutions were asked to volunteer the same information.
Most of the schools complied to some extent, although 42 (including Brigham Young University) refused to disclose any information at all, citing immunity from public-records laws, privacy prohibitions and, in some cases, the absence of pertinent records. The information provided by the other schools, however, paints a fragmented picture that suggests easy evasion for drug cheats, a lack of reliable oversight and, obviously, inconsistent punishment for those who do get caught.
Few major colleges and universities systematically test their athletes for performance-enhancing steroids, for example, generally leaving that to the NCAA’s drug-testing program, and only 16 of the 62 schools that provided their drug-testing policies require an athlete to be suspended from competition the first time he or she tests positive for one of the dozens of substances banned by the NCAA. The rest usually require some combination of counseling and continued testing, including the possibility of suspension or expulsion for subsequent failed tests. Some schools, such as South Florida and Tennessee, automatically suspend athletes who test positive for performance-enhancing drugs, but allow more lenient punishments for those who test positive for street drugs.
Schools drug testing program administrators seem happy with current efforts:
Although The Tribune investigation revealed inconsistencies among the dozens of institutional drug-testing programs across Division I-A, there is no overwhelming sense of ineffectiveness among those who administer them.
In fact, advocates generally believe the institutional programs work well in combination with the NCAA program, which the NCAA said has drastically reduced steroid use among college athletes.
The DaytaTree Team