May 8, 2009

Today’s headlines afford us an opportunity to look at how far we have come in professional sports' policies regarding drug testing.


News of Manny Ramirez’s 50 game suspension for the use of performance enhancing drugs was hard to miss yesterday. As of today, Ramirez has stated that he will not appeal the suspension. Almost all professional sports have some type of collectively bargained drug testing program today that deals with both performance enhancing drugs and drugs of abuse. Perfomance enhancing drugs are an enduringly hot topic.  It’s almost impossible to listen to any sports talk radio show and not hear about steroids in baseball these days.

Let’s go back to 1988, when drug testing programs in professional sports were in their infancy. That was the year of Richard Dent v. NFL. In this suit, Richard Dent of the Chicago Bears sought the lifting of a 30 day suspension imposed by the NFL for his refusal to take a drug test. League policy was to treat the refusal to take a test the same as if there had been a positive test. Chicago based attorney Eldon Ham represented Dent. Ham was able to successfully challenge the NFL’s policies of that time. The issue raised was whether the NFL could force a player to take unscheduled drug tests more than one year after a player had tested positive for a drug of abuse. Dent’s counsel argued that, due to the lengthy intervening time, reasonable cause did not exist for Dent to be tested. The 30 day suspension was not allowed.

Today professional sports drug testing is, by terms set in collective bargaining, much more random, and consequentially the reasonable cause issue has all but disappeared.

To sample the situation circa 1988 go to this SI link: 
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1067760/index.htm