Philip Sweitzer's Open Letter to Congress on the Recent Hearings and Legislation Relating to the Use of Anabolic Steroids in Sports
It is time for some difficult truth telling. That is the purpose of this letter: to force confrontation of the evidence, much of which Congress seems to want to avoid in a perpetuation of "war on drugs" hype and hypocrisy. The March 17, 2005 hearings before the House Committee on Government Reform showed Congress at its worst, the poison of loaded rhetoric dripping from every turn of phrase. Unsurprisingly, therefore, not only was truth-telling not the proceeding’s goal; rather, it wasn’t even a desired effect. This was pure advertising, pure "war on drugs" marketing hype, pure pandering to the political constituencies. With Social Security reform dead in the water, the president’s poll numbers plummeting, the war in Iraq going badly, and a growing "public suspicion" of Congress’s penchant for injecting itself into intensely personal and private matters – the moralizing over steroids in sports was ill-timed and ill-conceived, to say the very least. At worst, it represented a subversion of congressional authority, because it based legislative policy on known misrepresentations of scientific fact.
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