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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.
It's very difficult to create a rule "allow mild use of steroids, but don't allow more extreme use of steroids". If the Navy could easily get away with giving SEALs steroids, they would be motivated to give them enough steroids to maximize performance, not to maximize performance subject to the constraint "... as long as they are mild and don't affect health much".
In fact, your own post shows this. You mention "mild" steroids, but then go on to point out that we ask SEALs to sacrifice their lives. Do you really think the Navy wouldn't also ask them to sacrifice their health?
Just like the proper amount of a crime that is costly to stop is non-zero, the proper amount of "SEALs killing themselves by violating the rules" is non-zero.
This is true if "rule" means "lightly enforced law, for the general population". However, the navy could very easily (technically, idk about politically) run a "properly used steroid" program themselves, provide the drugs, ensure they're administered very safely, and still test for use of other drugs. If done well, this might reduce steroid use in general. (good idea? dunno. just a point about the power of a sovereign).
If they can run a "properly used steroid" program, they could also run a "dangerously used steroid" program (while still calling it "properly used", of course). The only significant forces that would stop them from doing that are forces that would stop them from having a steroid program at all.
The main forces that would stop the Navy from any sort of program are political.
... huh? This is like saying that hospitals can't use fentanyl as an anaesthetic sometimes, because the only thing stopping them from doing that are what's stopping them from selling fentanyl on the street. And yet ... they do the former, and not the latter. Or ... the only thing stopping the military from conquering the US and starting a new regime are that they don't really want to (and a lot more about connections, power, socialization, etc, but w/e). And that's the same thing stopping them from doing anything else. Yet they can revise their regulations without risking a coup.
The navy could do many different things they don't do. They could simply choose to run a good program and not a bad one, like they do with every other thing they do.
I'm not making a generic argument about when you can do X. I'm making a fact-specific one. There could, logically speaking, be things that stop the Navy from using steroids to excess without stopping them from using steroids at all. I'm just not convinced that these logical possibilities exist in reality, for the actual Navy.
The mechanism the navy would use would be their ... organizational structure, discipline, hierarchy, higher-ups ordering lower-levels around. The same way they prevent crime, the same way they organize training, the same way they deploy people. If that was used to give people steroids in a performance-enhancing yet restrained physically nondamaging way - why isn't that possible?
Like, they wouldn't allow using steroids you purchase yourself any more than they do now, that'd still be tested for and not allowed. But there'd be a navy doctor that puts you on a navy steroid program, monitors your dose and progress and health, etc.
Because it's not in the Navy's interests to limit the dosages to nondamaging ones. It's in their interests to give SEALs dosages of steroids that maximize the immediate usefulness of SEALs to the Navy, even at the cost of bad long term effects. So that'll be what they do.
Is this intended to be a point about military culture specifically - that the people who run it wouldn't limit the doses? Or 'interests' generally? It's certainly possible to have a Navy that limits steroid doses despite those 'interests'. But it's very possible the current navy wouldn't.
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