Duke drug tests cover wide scope

Questions involving steroid use at Duke have surfaced this month, but the Athletic Department has sought to provide answers for its student-athletes since the beginning of the school year, when it adapted its wide-ranging drug policy.

Duke’s revised Student-Athlete Drug Policy, which went into effect in August, no longer includes athletic suspensions for an athlete’s first positive drug test—a change made to provide a “safety net” with the threat of suspension and revoked scholarships at stake. The Athletic Department can still invoke other forms of sanctions for a student-athlete’s first positive test.

Although Athletic Department officials pitch their testing program to student-athletes as random, they can add players suspected of substance use to a random group selected for testing five to six times a year. The University has no obligation to report any finding from its own institutional drug tests to the NCAA, which performs its own sporadic testing.

Assistant Director of Athletics Brad Berndt, who oversees drug testing and academic support, said Duke’s new policy for enforcement and education is comparable to other ACC schools and was instituted primarily to help the student athletes.

“We felt like there was some ambiguous language in our policy, and it really wasn’t clear to the student-athletes: ‘What’s going to happen if I test positive?’” Berndt said.

“If we could put something in there that would give them a little bit of a safety net—not an easy way out but a safety net—to seek assistance and seek opportunity to be educated, and for us to help them we wanted to have that flexibility.”

The drug policy, included in an orientation handbook distributed to all players each fall, outlines an athletic suspension of 40 percent of the regular season for a second offense and permanent suspension after the third. All positive tests also include notification of teammates, parents and coaches, as well as mandatory counseling and community service.

In addition, the policy states, “The department also reserves the right to impose alternative sanctions at anytime, where appropriate.”

The Student-Athlete Drug Policy states that students are selected for testing either randomly or “when a coach or the Director of Athletics has a reasonable and articulable suspicion that the student-athlete has used a prohibited drug.”

The latter clause, referred to as “probable cause” testing, was part of the impetus for last year’s change in the penalty structure, said Chris Kennedy, senior associate athletic director.

“All burden fell upon coaches, administrators, officials of the athletic department to become accusers, to put them in the position of turning somebody in—potentially causing them to lose their scholarship,” Kennedy said. “You’re going to ask for a very high level of certainty before you do that, and we were afraid that that high level of certainty standard would preclude getting help to some people who might have problems that would visibly meet that standard.”

Probable cause additions are common at many other schools, but Duke has not actively communicated the longstanding policy to players in order to maintain the appearance of complete randomness.

“The motivation behind any drug testing is to try to dissuade any student-athletes from using drugs,” Athletic Director Joe Alleva said. “If we have suspicion that any athlete is using any drug of any kind, we can put them on the list.”

A number of Duke student-athletes believed the testing selection process was for the most part random, but they did notice some inconsistencies and were largely unaware of the probable cause clause.

“They say it’s totally random, but there’s one guy on the team that’s been tested five or six times in his three years here so far,” freshman tennis player Ned Samuelson said. “I guess they do rounds of testing randomly, but I guess depending on who you are they test you more.”

Junior men’s lacrosse player K.J. Sauer said he has been tested twice—once during the fall of his freshman year and once this past spring—and both tests were negative.

“I know kids that have been tested more than me, and these kids are straight as they come,” he said.

Junior linebacker Brendan Dewan said it was likely that all football team members would be drug tested at least three times during their collegiate careers by either the University or the NCAA.

Berndt acknowledged that some athletic teams are tested more often than others in order to “try and identify a problem early on if there is a problem.” He added that a player who tests positive is “certainly more likely” to be added to future testing groups under the probable cause provision.

The Athletic Department increased its testing of Duke’s baseball team following the Fall 2002 arrest of former player Grant Stanley for possession of anabolic steroids. Stanley said he was tested multiple times the following spring.

Another former baseball player, Aaron Kempster, said he and three of his teammates employed the amnesty clause that has existed in Duke’s drug policy for years to tell Kennedy in a confidential meeting that they had each used steroids.

Because the goal of the drug policy is both to educate students and provide support for athletes engaging in substance abuse, players can consult Berndt or Kennedy privately. The Athletic Department pays for counseling and therapy after an initial admission of a problem.

To prepare its student-athletes for drug-testing, Duke distributes guidelines in the Student-Athlete Handbook each year and also discusses it at eligibility meetings that begin the academic year.

Athletic trainers are knowledgeable about the long list of banned drugs, which include anabolic steroids, other performance-enhancing substances, narcotics and illegal drugs, officials said.

“They bring in multiple people to discuss not only anabolic steroids but also the stuff you get at GNC,” Dewan said. “The majority of that stuff is banned by the NCAA.”

 

The testing landscape

The University contracts the National Center for Drug Free Sport, the same company that administers the NCAA’s testing, to conduct tests on campus approximately five to six times a year.

Berndt selects a date and, after compiling a list of between 25 and 30 student-athletes, notifies Duke coaches the day before a test. Coaches normally relay the information to their players at practice, leaving players approximately 12 hours before having to report early the following morning.

While testing officials observe them, the athletes are asked to provide a urine sample, which is then tested on-site for specific gravity and pH to determine if the athletes have diluted it by drinking large quantities of water or taking a masking agent. Once a valid sample is collected, student-athletes watch as the officials seal the vials to prevent any tampering. Further tests are completed at outside labs.

Because steroid-specific tests cost more than those for street drugs—marijuana and heroine, for example—they are not necessarily conducted each time a sample is given. A 2001 NCAA study of substance use in programs across the country reported that only 26 percent of samples collected in Division I institutional drug tests were tested for anabolic steroids.

In a report about the Duke baseball team published in The Chronicle April 15, current and former players described a culture of steroid use that reached its peak in the summer of 2002. Kempster and Stanley said they used steroids that summer without fear of being caught.

Berndt said Duke has the authority to conduct drug tests during the summer but has never invoked that right. Most steroids clear out of a body’s system after about a month, said Dr. William Roberts, president of the American College of Sports Medicine.

“Testing didn’t occur all that often, and, plus, once school got out you weren’t tested,” Stanley said. “There were loopholes within the testing program. At the end of each semester you were confident that you weren’t going to get tested and you could do what you please.”

Each institution has the right to define its own drug-testing policy and sanctions without having to report its findings to the NCAA or any other governing body.

NCAA President Myles Brand said the NCAA investigates information it receives regarding accusations of drug use, but he admitted that the collegiate governing body is limited in its authority.

“Sometimes in the summer, if they’re not attending summer school, we don’t have the legal authority to test,” Brand said at a panel discussion Tuesday at North Carolina. “So we test when they come back.”

The NCAA conducts year-round testing at every Division I institution in football and, in a policy change implemented this year, one additional sport each year. Before August, football and track and field were the only sports subject to year-round testing by the NCAA, although all teams could be tested at any stage of both team and individual postseason championships. The NCAA penalizes athletes who test positive for any banned substance with a minimum one-year suspension and loss of a year of eligibility.

“We have a guarantee to test every championship once every five years,” said Mary Wilfert, the NCAA’s assistant director of education outreach and point person on drug testing and education. “Some sports are tested more often than others because of history, drug use surveys and increased performance use.”

In 2002-2003, the latest year for which results are available, about 1 percent of the NCAA’s samples came back positive for a banned substance. Duke has not released any of its drug testing results.

The NCAA conducts its tests at Duke once or twice a year, and it remains unlikely that the NCAA will bring institutional testing under its monitoring umbrella.

“There are different programs that have different needs and different problems, and so I think it’d be pretty difficult to do across the board,” Berndt said of the possibility of the NCAA overseeing all Division I drug testing. “They’ve streamlined the process for championship events, and I think that’s the extent of their involvement, at least for right now.”

Jake Poses, Matt Sullivan and Andrew Yaffe contributed reporting to this story.