The annual public report from the Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program’s Independent Program Administrator has been released by Major League Baseball. The stats:
- There were 5,391 total drug tests. 4,022 were urine samples, 1,369 were blood samples;
- There were eight positive tests resulting in discipline. All were for stimulants. Seven of the stimulant tests were for Adderall. One for Methylhexaneamine. I guess that means that there are no more steroids in baseball. Yay!
- There were 13 “non-analytical positives.” That’s baseball code for “Biogenesis dudes.”
- There were 122 therapeutic use exemptions for otherwise banned drugs. 119 of them were for ADD drugs like Adderall. Three were three for hypogonadism. A couple of years ago here was only one for hypogonadism, so that’s on the uptick. On the bright side, two years ago there was a therapeutic use exemption for narcolepsy and now there is none. So the narcoleptic either got better or retired.
The most interesting thing here, to me anyway, continues to be the number of Adderall-users in baseball. It’s estimated that 4.7% of the adult population has ADD. 119 of roughly 1,200 major leaguers on 40-man rosters puts the ADD rate at nearly 10%. Back that number down a little bit for the various guys that shuffle in and out of 400-man rosters and you figure that baseball players have ADD diagnosis at around twice the level of that in the normal population.
Are baseball players more likely to have ADD than the rest of the adult population? Are they just more likely to be diagnosed that way? Or are therapeutic use exemptions for ADD drugs a means of getting something ballplayers have always found beneficial -- stimulants -- in a legal way?
