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Dual InjectionDrugs, enhancement, and Roger Clemens' wife.

By William Saletan
Posted Friday, Feb. 22, 2008, at 11:32 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

The congressional spin on the Clemens investigation is that it's supposed to teach kids about honesty, cheating, and respecting the law. Somebody's lying, somebody's telling the truth, and the bad guy has to be punished. But the Debbie Clemens story teaches a different lesson. Drugs that purportedly enhance our bodies seldom spread through society because their users or pushers are dishonest. They spread from person to person and from use to use because they gradually acquire legitimacy. The line between legal and illegal blurs.

HGH, like many other drugs, has been approved by the government for on-label uses. That approval gives the drug its basic legitimacy. At that point, some doctors feel emboldened to prescribe it, and some users feel entitled to take it, for other purposes. You hear about somebody else using it, you hear it's legal, you hear it's safe, and you hear it might give you something you want. You focus on the noun—the drug itself, which has been approved—and not on the verb: the unapproved purpose you have in mind. The on-label stage makes the drug familiar enough to invite the off-label stage, which gradually makes other uses familiar as well. We simply get used to it. Drugs aren't an invasion. They're an inside job.

In that respect, Debbie Clemens is a more instructive enhancement creep than her husband is. McNamee says he told another pitcher, Andy Pettitte, that "a lot of women take [HGH], it has a good effect on women, and Debbie had tried it, Debbie Clemens had tried it." Clemens says he told Pettitte that his wife had used HGH. Pettitte's wife says her husband passed along the story. It's hard to believe that the wives, like the husbands, didn't feel some pressure or temptation to keep up with their peers.

I can't predict how the Clemens-McNamee fight will turn out. But you can be pretty sure of two things. One is that Congress will issue simplistic pieties about cheating and illegal drugs. The other is that the government will continue to blur the line of legitimacy. Just a week ago, the FDA issued draft guidelines that would let drug companies distribute journal articles touting unapproved uses of their products. The FDA's press release quoted its deputy commissioner: "Articles that discuss unapproved uses of FDA-approved drugs and devices can contribute to the practice of medicine and may even constitute a medically recognized standard of care."

In drugs, as in baseball, everybody wants heroes and villains. If only it were that simple.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Photograph of Debbie Clemens by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
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