INSTITUTIONAL HEALTH.(The Talk of the Town; ethics)

Several months ago, an anonymous track-and-field coach sent a vial of clear liquid to the drug-testing laboratory at U.C.L.A. Inside the vial, the coach said, was one of the sporting world's dirty little secrets--and, sure enough, after months of chemical analysis the lab found an anabolic steroid called tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG, which had been cleverly engineered to evade standard drug testing. Since then, the governing bodies of the sports world have been going back and, one by one, re-analyzing the urine samples they have on file--and discovering that some athletes they thought were clean are not. Last week, the scandal spread to professional football. According to news reports, at least four members of the Oakland Raiders--Dana Stubblefield, Chris Cooper, Barret Robbins, and Bill Romanowski--tested positive for THG. The Raiders' coach, Bill Callahan, faced reporters and admitted that the controversy had left his team shaken. The media were barred from the Raiders' locker room. The Players' Union huddled with league officials to discuss what was fair punishment and what was not. All in all, it was a week of long faces and sombre talk, as the league struggled with the question of how to best protect the health of its athletes.

Then, in the midst of this, the N.F.L. released its weekly update of players currently suffering from football-related injuries. The list was two hundred and forty-seven names long. Here, for example, are the Washington Redskin players identified (in one of the N.F.L.'s many wonderfully economical euphemisms) as "probable" for the next game, meaning, by football standards, that their injuries are not considered serious enough to keep them off the field:

LB LaVar Arrington (knee/hand); CB Champ Bailey (wrist/shoulder); S Matt Brown (concussion); WR Laveranues Coles (toe); RB Bryan Johnson (concussion); DE Bruce Smith (hand/knee); CB Fred Smoot (chest).

It is always useful--and occasionally entertaining--to try and unravel the philosophical convolutions of America's attitude toward drugs. (One wonders, for instance, how long it will take the Bush Administration's drug czar to call for random testing of the country's conservative-talk-show hosts.) But the N.F.L.'s bluster over THG, it must be said, is in a class by itself. Over the past few years, a number of epidemiological studies have made it clear that playing in the N.F.L. is a uniquely hazardous activity. N.F.L. linemen are half again as likely to suffer from heart disease as the average American male, and almost half of them suffer from skeletal ailments--not to mention elevated rates of arthritis, obesity, depression, and post-concussive disorder. The human body is simply not built to be thrown repeatedly onto concrete-hard playing fields, at top speed, by helmet-wearing, muscle-bound three-hundred-pound giants. But that's not what the N.F.L. was wringing its hands about last week--it was too busy warning players against defiling the temple that is their body with an unapproved pharmaceutical. In the circumstances, it's not hard to understand why the Players' Union was moved to respond with the ridiculous argument that, since THG wasn't on the list of banned substances when the season began, it was unfair to penalize players after the fact for having taken it--even ...