Cocaine

The Schoolyard that Wharton Lee Madkins oversees is one of many of its kind. The children he supervises six hours a day are typical of thousands across the nation. On a cul-de-sac in a quiet middle-class American suburb is the neighborhood recreation center over which he exercises authority. Today it is overrun, as it is six days a week, with citizens yet to achieve voting age, burning off enough energy to incinerate the place.

In no hurry to impose order upon the chaos all around him, Madkins, sitting in his glass-paneled office, is politely fielding questions about school children and sports. Explaining how in 13 years he has coached 500 kids, he is telling a story about one of them.

"When Lenny came here, he was 11 or 12. He went to the elementary school. He wanted to play football, but he was so tall, there were no pants to fit him. We didn't want him playing without kneepads, you see."

So Madkins put him in the basketball program. The boy played 13 and under at the rec center.

"We watched him come up, watched him blossom."

Lenny was cut from his junior high school team but continued to play for Madkins.

"When he was 15, we took him to a tournament in Philadelphia. That's when I knew--we all knew."

Out of high school, (continued on page 68)Cocaine(continued from page 57) the young man was recruited by the state university. As a sophomore, he started to play.

"He never got so big he wouldn't come back here."

Both as a high school player and as a starter in college, Lenny came around to help out with the younger boys.

"Sometimes he came in just to talk."

"Did you ever talk to him about his grades?"

Madkins answers with a shake of his head.

"We overlooked that," he admits, adding forthrightly, "we should have talked to him about his grades, but we never did."

Not many others did, either.

When Len Bias signed with the Boston Celtics out of the University of Maryland, he was flunking or had withdrawn from his entire course load.

"Lenny was a kid who couldn't say no. He trusted everybody; he figured everybody was his friend. He didn't know anybody was his enemy. That's what got him into trouble."

The trouble Madkins is talking about is Len Bias' disastrously brief flirtation with cocaine. The trust is that which he placed in the person who offered him the drug that killed him.

What Madkins may just as well be talking about, however, is the trust Bias placed in the University of Maryland, the state institution that failed to educate him, that faith that the young man invested so effortlessly in professional sports, the rewards of which, as pursued in this country, can be as quick to turn around on you as any reward cocaine has to offer.

"We finally got a superstar in our neighborhood," Madkins will tell you.

What happened after that is tragically simple.

"He just got away from us."

•

According to estimates by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, the American public snorted, smoked, injected and otherwise consumed 100 metric tons of street-grade cocaine in 1985.

Not all of the users were athletes. There is no evidence to suggest that the incidence of cocaine use among athletes is higher than among the general population. It may very well be lower. All one can say is that cocaine consumption is so widespread today that even athletes, of all people, are using it.

Given the country's estimated 3,000,000 to 6,000,000 cocaine consumers and the amount they are apparently consuming, and given the fact that reported cocaine-related deaths still number only in the hundreds each year, the drug's lethality is by every measure overregarded.

The saddling of cocaine with properties it does not possess is the contribution of a small but vocal group of self-interested people, the more vociferous of whom fall into two general categories: those whose livelihoods depend on the drug's continued visibility and those who are looking, for one reason or another, to deflect responsibility for the drug problem away from themselves.

Into the first group fall the Federally funded academics and physicians whose research money ebbs and flows on shifting political tides. Among the more ambitious privately funded pitchmen are the physicians who own the various cocaine hotlines around the country that are designed to operate principally as referral services to clinics run for profit. As self-styled experts on cocaine--a staple in the pharmacopoeia of civilization for no less than 1000 years--they hustle the drug as though its mysteries were elusive to keep the money flowing in their direction.

Among those who fall into the second group, the ones for whom cocaine provides a very convenient dodge, is National Football League commissioner Pete Rozelle.

"Professional athletes are an ideal target for drug use," he asserts. "They fall within the susceptible age group, 20 to 35. They receive inordinate salaries. They have free time due to the short length of the professional sports seasons."

Rozelle is correct: The average N.F.L. salary-and-benefits package in 1986 was $266,000. With the rise of free agency in 1976, the annual compensation of majorleague-baseball players went from a 1975 average of about $45,000 to the current $430,000. Very suddenly achieving the economic status of plastic surgeons, arbitragers and a handful of lead-guitar players, many young athletes became candidates for cocaine use overnight.

What the accuracy of Rozelle's assertion obscures, however, is the extent of his own culpability and that of the N.F.L.

Dr. Harry Edwards, a sports sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley and an organizer of the black protest at the Mexico City summer Olympics in 1968, says today's athletic training room is all too often a "pharmaceutical haven" where "the pill, the capsule, the vial and the needle are commonplace." According to Dr. Edwards, there is truth to the axiom "Whether you win or lose is determined less by how well you play the game than by who your pharmacist is."

Can you blame the average athlete for not being afraid of cocaine? What is a little blow to a guy who has given his entire body over to the wrenching physical chemistry of drugs that are commonly restricted to geriatrics and the acutely debilitated? This is a guy who in the most active years of his reproductive life has been force-fed the kind of anabolic steroids traditionally associated with livestock.

The real drug problem in professional sports is one the teams themselves have created and passed along to every college in the country.

Even without this bad example in the big leagues, college athletes would be prime candidates for drug abuse. Elevated in the popular imagination to the status of nobility and underwritten with a salary to match, the successful athlete is surrounded by people who tamper with his ego. At a time when his character is just taking shape, he is forced to reconcile his self-image with an image forced upon him by others. In college, his development is further skewed by his segregation from the student body. Taken out of the mainstream of college life, an athlete like Len Bias is further isolated by the requirements of travel and tournament play, the demands of everything from practice time to press relations.

According to Edwards, "The average college athlete is so removed from real college life that he's not in the mainstream to begin with. He's a player first and a student second, if at all. He's walked at every level through the academic bureaucracy. The disruption is having to take classes."

The pressures of sudden celebrity, combined with the pressures on him to perform at a professional level in a sport he once played for enjoyment, catch the college athlete at an age when he is unequipped to deal with them. Add to this the current peer pressure relative to drug use and you have a casualty waiting to happen.

There was a time when peer pressure on athletes was applied from the opposite direction--when they were considered an enviable and clean-living elite and were expected to stay that way. It was a time when their friends would have been the last to offer them anything the slightest bit toxic and the first to punch out anyone who did.

Not only has peer pressure relative to drug use changed but in big-time, big-money, high-pressure sports, an athlete's talent is so prized that those who pay him--and many who pay to see him perform--are likely to overlook a constellation of personal weaknesses. Under the pressure to win at any cost, team owners and coaches from high school to the pros (continued on page 155)Cocaine(continued from page 68) are increasingly recruiting athletes who bring drug histories with them.

Athletes are as susceptible to mixed messages as anyone else. Americans consume more drugs, legal and illegal, than any other people on earth. From prescription drugs to patent medicines, from the coffee break to the three-martini lunch, from marijuana to cocaine, we have so institutionalized dope use that anyone who abstains from drugs could well be considered deviant.

Dr. Marlin Mackenzie, counselor to scores of amateur and professional athletes and director of the Sports Performance Laboratory at Teachers College, Columbia University, feels that athletes are just another group of victims in what he sees as a dependent culture.

Dr. Mackenzie says ours is a society in which young people are not encouraged to take responsibility for their own lives: "As infants, we are wired to be independent, but society reinforces quite the opposite. And sports are a good example." Although the potential benefit of an athletic program is in giving a student a sense of his own power, Mackenzie says, athletes today are constantly being told what to do.

As Harry Edwards points out, "We begin to compress them into unidimensional personalities; we insist that above all they be athletes. And nobody expects anything else of them. They become deficient in other forms of development; they often feel that traditional restrictions don't apply to them. Even when one is found to be deficient, we tell him, 'We will cover for you because you are a ballplayer.' They are suspended in a state of perpetual adolescence. They rely on others to applaud them, to reward them, to determine whether they arc successful."

They are playing for their coaches, for their fathers or for their teammates, Mackenzie explains, and the emphasis on winning is enormous. They apply pressure to themselves and blame its consequences on others, the flip side of their dependency being a lack of accountability.

"What goes on out there is totally unrealistic," he points out. "Athletes expect to be number one, and the truth is 85 percent of them lose." Taking his statistics from baseball (with one world-series winner) and from professional tennis (where two out of 256 win in an average singles tournament), as well as N.C.A.A. basketball, he says, "An athlete puts pressure on himself to be one of 15 percent, and this emphasis on winning undermines the very foundation of sports."

According to Mackenzie, college athletes are especially vulnerable, Bias being a good example.

"Many athletes don't have the intellectual ability for college. Their dependency is exacerbated by the presence of academic counselors and tutors. Soon the student loses all sense of his own identity. It is very hard for an athlete today to feel good about himself. And one thing drugs do is make you feel good."

In a continuing spiral, illegal drugs reinforce an athlete's low self-esteem by immediately making him a criminal. Mackenzie, who sees organized athletic endeavor as "a very positive growth experience," is optimistic about the athletes' ability to interrupt that spiral.

"Athletes are unique. They control their physical performance with extremely complex mental processes--they have great power and capacity. Successful counseling lies in simply turning a student back on his own resources."

•

The resources on which we as a nation fall back are not quite so easy to identify.

Before the availability of nickel-bag free-base, before the appearance of crack on the street, a cocaine habit in America was about as easy to come by as an interest-bearing account in Zurich. Chiefly a law-enforcement issue until recently, cocaine, the white-collar white man's recreational accessory, was pretty much overlooked by politicians in the Seventies. Where drug use in general galvanized almost no political attention until it moved out of the ghetto in the Sixties, cocaine use in particular did not become the national election issue it is until it moved, in the form of crack, back into the ghetto.

A principal agent in the ruined careers of various white professionals--the wealthy in particular, celebrities, including athletes, in general--cocaine, ironically, has finally found its way onto the legislative agenda through the politically unignorable death of a single black American youth.

Ronald Reagan, who turned his attention to the drug issue only after his pollster Richard Wirthlin insisted he do so, may be the only modern President smooth enough to put a drug program over on the American public. It was not long ago that Americans received an enlightening lesson in the politics of heroin in Southeast Asia. Not much more than a decade has passed since the Central Intelligence Agency, in support of anti-Communist war lords in Thailand, was flying the heroin they processed out of the Golden Triangle, bringing tons of smack to market here (where the Justice Department was jailing marijuana smokers) in the name of national security.

Similar forces are at work today all over the Middle East. A thriving market in hashish has its correlative in the security of American interests in Lebanon. Does anybody truly expect any President of the United States to move on even the most coke-fluid Latin-American government when its continued stability is essential to his policy in the region?

Is it any wonder that so many today have so little respect for the law, so little regard for the rules, for any code of conduct articulated by leadership as morally bankrupt as this?

•

In the 1986 N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, each college whose team made the Final Four took home $893,000. The 1986 Rose Bowl paid $11,600,000 to the two teams that competed. An athletic scholarship today is a capital investment; it is what a university spends to make that kind of money. In lieu of payment for the athlete's services, the university agrees to educate him. Implicit in the spirit of the contract is the fact that the university will violate it. Not only do colleges recruit illiterates, they graduate them with bachelor's degrees. Compensating athletes with the illusion that four years of dedicated service will lead to a lucrative career in professional sports, they fail to stipulate how statistically prohibitive the odds are against a player's ever being invited to compete at that level. Given the value of such a degree, the likelihood of his being hired to do anything else is even more remote.

•

Cocaine is more dangerous than a legion of equally powerful drugs because it is not available legally. To have spontaneous access to cocaine--as opposed to alcohol, say--an athlete has to join a criminal subculture that sooner or later alters his values, changes everything he has ever believed of himself. Making a felon out of everyone who uses it, cocaine breeds a kind of situational ethics in otherwise law-abiding citizens. Soon criminal behavior is nothing more than a figure of speech.

Where cocaine differs from other illegal drugs is in the undeniable reality that everybody--including all those who so regularly condemn it--thinks it is sexy. Vilifying drug use in general, the press plays on coke's glamor to sell magazines, daily papers and nightly news broadcasts. Just as local anchor people expropriated such words as bust and rip-off from the counterculture in the Sixties, they enthusiastically borrow street jargon today to introduce cops-and-dope-dealers footage that scans like the typical music video.

A television program such as Miami Vice, in which the antidrug forces are the heroes, takes its glamor from the lifestyles of its various villains and from the stylishness of cops who just happen to live like coke dealers.

No doubt, Len Bias thought cocaine was sexy, too. It was all part of a very slick package he bought when he left the Columbia Park Recreation Center, when he set forth from Landover, Maryland, and entered the world of big-time sports.

What he might have learned had he lived a little longer was that nobody really cared that he was flunking everything in sight. His degree was not a part of the package.

"Mr. Madkins," Bias said after his Celtics physical, "it's like [they're] buying a piece of meat."

•

In the end, what went wrong, tragically, was that nothing went wrong. The recent embarrassment, the "Len Bias thing," was nothing more than business as usual.

It is a business in which we are all participants. And athletes are not its only victims. Ensuring the physical and intellectual development of its children reflects no merit upon a nation that sends them forth with underdeveloped hearts.

Cocaine has been around for centuries. Like other things that do nothing but make you feel good, cocaine produces benefits that are only temporary. A danger to people who have nothing better to do with their time, it is a calamity in a society overflowing with people who have nothing better to do with their lives.

Wharton Lee Madkins says, "We'll pay more attention to the kids. We'll follow up this time. We're going to have a study program. If the kids put half their time into studying, they'll be smart."

Shaking his head, he says, "We got so hung up on basketball."

"What went wrong, tragically, is that nothing went wrong. The recent embarrassment, the 'Len Bias thing,' was nothing more than business as usual."

" 'Whether you win or lose is determined less by how well you play than by who your pharmacist is.' "

"To have spontaneous access to cocaine, an athlete has to join a criminal subculture that sooner or later changes everything he has ever believed of himself."