Supply and enhance : tracing the doping supply chain in the 1980s

Like Michael Jackson’s iconic album Thriller, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, performance-enhancing drugs are part of the zeitgeist of the 1980s, a decade of turbulence in the sporting world and one of enlightenment for fans and journalists worldwide. Sport’s dirty little secret was first revealed at the 1983 Pan-American Games, where a throng of positive tests and the mass exodus of (ostensibly) guilty American athletes brought doping to mainstream audiences, and alerted policy makers to a societal ill that could no longer be ignored. Popular anabolic drugs like Dianabol and Testosterone Depot had been in wide use for decades, and in the absence of rigorous controls – both anti-doping and statutory – spread like wildfire in elite sport, bodybuilding, and gym culture. By the mid-1980s gaining access to them was all but a formality, as simple as paying a visit to one’s family physician, the resident dealer at Gold’s Gym, or the local discus champion peddling Mexican steroids to make ends meet. While chemical enhancement in this era is well-represented in the extant literature, relatively little has been said about how these drugs fell in the hands of users. Each of the three articles in this volume survey a different supply source for performance-enhancing drugs in the 1980s. In the first study, I profile the enigmatic doping physician Robert Kerr, an open advocate for the safe use of anabolic steroids under medical supervision. After prescribing the drugs for more than seventeen years, Kerr embraced the role of anti-doping advocate, appearing as an expert witness in several government-led hearings in the late 1980s. In the second study, I investigate a drug-smuggling incident at Montreal’s Mirabel Airport. On 31 October 1983, four of Canada’s premier weightlifters were arrested after border agents discovered a cache of anabolic steroids in each of their bags. The men had purchased them from Soviet lifters for resale on home soil. The third essay chronicles the rise and fall of America’s largest steroid distribution ring, and as a parallel narrative, an anti-steroid counteroffensive headed by the FBI. Combined, these studies provide historical context for the proliferation of doping agents in North America, and the efforts of sports federations and politicians to remedy the problem.