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A Death at BUDS, or How Anti-Science Ideologies Trickle Down to Harm Heroes
TLDR: Media bias against drugs leads to people ignoring obvious, medically supported interventions. This creates room for other people to cheat the system, which creates dangers. Kyle Mullen would probably be alive today were he on a medically supervised steroid cycle instead of buying a used car to store his illegal drugs in and learning how to use them from some mix of bros at the base and bros on the internet. I say bring on the Space Marines, or at least provide pure drugs at military expense, it’s only polite.
By any reasonable standard, Kyle Mullen was a Hero in the making, in the classical sense. A muscular 6’4 SEAL candidate, choosing to forego a career out of an Ivy League school to serve his country.
He finished the toughest parts of SEAL training, and died on the beach afterward. NYT article here, all quotes are from that article. The NYT story was a real gut punch, expose and heartbreaker all rolled into one, I recommend reading the whole thing and now it’s circulating through the “Summarize a real journalist’s work, make two generic comments, and pass it off as your own” internet chain. Slate chimed in to probably say the whole thing is to be blamed on Toxic Masculinity, The National Review of course needs to Defend Tradition while blaming the drugs, even some Arab website hopped on to call it an example of American brutality, cheating, and drug culture.
What none of the think pieces suggested was the obvious solution: if steroids make you better at the things we want SEALs to be good at, give them steroids. Why are SEALs buying them independently and taking them secretly, when it would all go much better if the SEALs program offered an option to be put on a mild steroid cycle under doctor’s supervision? At the very least, that’s as upsetting as schoolteachers buying their own school supplies!
Teaching trainee soldiers to cheat goes back to at least the Spartan Agoge, and I doubt Lycurgus was totally innovative on this one. But you can prevent trainees from going off the rails by providing reasonable rails. What killed Limewire et al (or at least made them less prominent), wasn’t suing some random college kids for downloading an album, it was creating a legal framework for listening to music online and paying for it. While testing is suggested as a solution, it hasn't worked in sports so I fail to see how we can be optimistic it will work here.
If cheating is easy and it works, then the only solution is to obviate the need for it by making it legal in a managed form.
The Dead Pool is a real phenomenon, steroids are nothing to play with. But those kinds of results come from out of control drug use without medical supervision by guys who are used to pushing their limits, and are OK with dying in the process. There is no question that overuse of steroids can have negative health impacts, but a light, managed cycle isn’t going to make it any more likely that anyone dies, it would probably reduce the odds of other injuries during BUDS if it were used to manage existing problems and lead to more medical supervision. Steroids are like anything else, they follow the 80/20 rule: the first extra push gets you most of the results, then you can keep adding more and more to get attenuated marginal gains. WADA isn’t going to test SEALs before they kick in doors and disqualify guys that don’t have clean piss. Putting all SEAL candidates who want it on a basic cycle would obviate the desire to go on more, level the playing field, and improve performance.
Instead, the Navy chooses to make the competition ever more fierce, and just hope that guys won't cheat or get themselves into trouble.
Like everything else in American life, the competition at the top is increasingly fierce. The bifurcation of American life into a Barbell Chart of winners and losers doesn’t stop anywhere. SEAL training is particularly brutal, consider this story of a man who was probably tougher and in better shape than anyone on theMotte:
Seriously, I don’t know the whole story, but in what universe is a guy 50/50 between commando and snack counter? There wasn’t a slightly more useful landing spot?
You’re asking these guys to take a gamble between doing their dream job being a certified superhero, with highly paid job opportunities galore in a variety of fields after they serve their country with honor, and obscurity behind the snack counter. Is it any wonder that they’ll do anything to win, especially when you already select for guys willing to risk death?
I’m really just putting this quote here as a laugh line. We ask SEALs to be elite, to be the best, to sacrifice their bodies, their lives, and often parts of their souls; but God forbid they break the rules by taking medicine that makes their lives easier.
Early aughts Rick Reilly really did a number on America, we’re still recovering from it and realizing just what Better Living Through Chemistry can do for us. But our sportswriters and their cousins in the hard news are the main way the public hears about steroids: I would bet that more NYT writers/editors know someone using Test to transition than using Test to hit a PR. They’re pulling their info from SI, not from T Nation. Much of the NYT commentariat and audience views male weightlifting and fitness with vague suspicion of wrong think. That combination gives us a public discourse about steroids soaked in myths about roid rage, tiny testicles, and ignoring all the scientific studies of the health benefits of testosterone supplementation. Much like a recent discussion of plastic surgery, if everyone keeps it a secret you only ever notice the bad work, not all the work that passes.
The result is that someone like Kyle, who should have been serving his country with distinction, or at least living the probably pleasant life of a former Yale football captain, instead chose to buy a used car to hide his drugs in, inject himself with God-only-knows-what, and died before he ever saw an enemy combatant. What a waste. Let’s at least consider the possibility that the problem wasn’t drug use as such, but using illegal drugs dosed by an amateur, with the obvious preventative being legal drugs dosed by medical professionals under regular observation for results. Recognize that bad results come from homebrew experimentation, not from the substance itself. Let's give Justice to Kyle, not by weakening SEAL training or introducing an ever expanding and expensive team of nannies to keep an eye on everyone, but by doing something that might actually have saved his life.
I agree with much of what you said and want to add an additional layer - everywhere outside of "performance enhancing drugs", Americans are obsessed with pharmaceutical intervention to make their lives easier. This is true from psychoactive drugs of questionable efficacy to spamming statins and diabetes medications on every sedentary middle-aged patient that could probably fix their metabolic health through non-pharmaceutical means. People take medications for all sorts of things and don't feel even the slightest bit of shame that they've damaged their minds and bodies to the point that they require daily chemical alteration to avoid falling apart.
But if I wanted EPO simply because I think it would be neat to ride my bike up hills faster? Nope! Somehow that is where we draw the line and decide that this isn't just a bad idea, but downright unethical. I won't make a penny doing it, I'd be happy to pay for the drug out of my pocket, but somehow we've decided that there are classes of drugs that are simply beyond the pale. The same goes for various steroids that would improve my fitness and strength, effectively making me a better version of myself.
Can you imagine the absolute shitfit that would be thrown if anyone in a position of power suggested that all people who require psych meds should be thrown out of the military?
And That's A Bad Thing because, in most cases, meds don't mend. Do you see this obsession with medication as a positive characteristic? Sure, it's arbitrary to draw the line an PEDs, but are you saying there shouldn't be a line?
I also see it as a bad thing, but think it's even worse that effective enhancements are seen as immoral while patching over bad behavior is seen as totally normal.
"Bad behavior" is a tricky thing. Never using your automobile for anything that isn't absolutely necessary reduces your chance of dying, but we don't say that it's immoral to treat someone for injuries suffered when they drive to visit their relatives for the holidays and get in an accident.
In other words, pretty much any "behavior" has an effect on your life expectancy. Claiming that we shouldn't treat people for medical problems related to their behavior is equivalent to saying that we shouldn't treat them for anything at all except a few edge cases.
The argument "they're imposing a public cost by their behavior" is really an argument against all publically funded medical treatments--that is, publically funded medical treatments are bad because they create incentives to restrict behavior, not the other way around.
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