The recorded use of deadly force against unarmed suspects and sustained protest from the Black Lives Matter movement, among others, have ignited a national debate about excessive violence in American policing. Missing from the debate, however, is any discussion of a factor that is almost certainly contributing to the violence—the use of anabolic steroids by police officers. Mounting evidence from a wide range of credible sources suggests that many cops are abusing testosterone and its synthetic derivatives. This drug use is illegal and encourages a "steroidal" policing style based on aggressive behaviors and hulking physiques that diminishes public trust in law enforcement.
Dopers in Uniform offers the first assessment of the dimensions and consequences of the felony use of anabolic steroids in major urban police departments. Marshalling an array of evidence, John Hoberman refutes the frequent claim that police steroid use is limited to a few "bad apples," explains how the "Blue Wall of Silence" stymies the collection of data, and introduces readers to the broader marketplace for androgenic drugs. He then turns his attention to the people and organizations at the heart of police culture: the police chiefs who often see scandals involving steroid use as a distraction from dealing with more dramatic forms of misconduct and the police unions that fight against steroid testing by claiming an officer's "right to privacy" is of greater importance. Hoberman's findings clearly demonstrate the crucial need to analyze and expose the police steroid culture for the purpose of formulating a public policy to deal with its dysfunctional effects.

Dopers in Uniform: The Hidden World of Police on Steroids (Terry and Jan Todd Series on Physical Culture and Sports)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Hoberman, John

Addiction & Recovery

University of Texas Press

Across the modern political spectrum, left-wing and right-wing political theorists have invested sport with ideological significance. That significance, however, varies distinctively and characteristically with the ideology—a phenomenon John Hoberman terms "ideological differentiation." Taking this phenomenon as its point of departure, this provocative work interprets the major sport ideologies of the twentieth century as distinct expressions of political doctrine.
Hoberman argues that a political ideology's interpretation of sport is shaped in part by the value it assigns to work and play as modes of experience; the political anthropologies of right and left can be distinguished by examining their resistance to—or affinity for—sportive imagery of their leaders and of the state itself; there exists a fascist temperament that shows an affinity to athleticism and the sphere of the body that is not shared by the left.
Tracing modern sport ideology back to its premodern antecedents, Hoberman examines the interpretations of sport that have been promulgated by European political intellectuals, such as cultural conservatives and contemporary neo-Marxists, and by the official ideologists of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and China before and after Mao.
As a form of mass theater, sport can advertise any ideology. But the deeper relationship between sport and political ideology has never before been explored wth such vigor. Presenting the first general theory of sport and political ideology to appear in any language, Hoberman's groundbreaking work is a unique and invaluable contribution to the intellectual and political history of sport in the twentieth century.

Sport and Political Ideology

Sports & Outdoors

Miscellaneous

DARWIN'S ATHLETES focuses on society's fixation with black athletic achievement. Hoberman argues that this obsession has come to play a troubling role in African American life and our country's race relations. Rich, flamboyant superstars lend credence to age-old prejudices, recycled "scientific" theories denigrating black intelligence, and stereotypes of black violence. This portrayal of black identity encourages a disdain for academic achievement already too widespread among black males. Darwin's Athletes is a powerful indictment of modern sport's racial spectacle.

Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Mariner Books

Testosterone has inspired dreams―of restored youth, recharged sexual appetites, faster running, quicker thinking, bigger muscles―since it was first synthesized in 1935. This provocative book investigates the complex, bizarre, and sometimes outrageous history of synthetic testosterone and other male hormone therapies. Exploring many little-known social arenas―both inside and outside the medical world―in which these substances are becoming increasingly available and accepted, Testosterone Dreams examines the implications and dangers of their use in professional sports, in the workplace, in our sex lives, and beyond. Testosterone Dreams tells the story of testosterone's growing and sometimes concealed influence in our culture over the past 70 years. It explores such controversial topics as the invention and marketing of the male menopause, the disturbing history of hormonal and other medical treatments aimed at boosting or suppressing women's sexuality, and hormone doping in sporting events such as the Tour de France and the Olympics, and in Major League Baseball. It brings to light the hidden use of hormone doping by policemen, soldiers, and other workers in a variety of jobs. It also discusses the burgeoning steroid use in the gay community and its relation to AIDS, and takes a hard look at the pharmaceutical industry's promotional campaigns to create new markets for testosterone products. Testosterone Dreams is the first book to bring together the whole story of testosterone and to consider its social and ethical implications: Where does therapy end and performance enhancement begin? How are changing medical technologies affecting how we think about our identities as men and women and the elusive goal of "well-being"? This book will be essential reading as we move inexorably toward the wide-open, libertarian pharmacology that is now making these drug regimes available to a wider and wider clientele.

Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping

University of California Press

Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism

Black &amp; Blue is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of physicians practicing medicine today. Black &amp; Blue penetrates the physician’s private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry. Doctors have thus imposed white or black racial identities upon every organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds and bodies. The American medical establishment does not readily absorb either historical or current information about medical racism. For this reason, racial enlightenment will not reach medical schools until the current race-aversive curricula include new historical and sociological perspectives.

In this reprint of a classic originally published in 1992, John Hoberman dissects the modern sports establishments of Europe and America and shows how a community of mutually dependent interest groups combine to promote continued scientific experiments despite futile efforts by Olympic authorities to enforce their sanctions on those who violate the ban on illicit drugs. Hoberman also reflects on the future of sport as we enter a new era of unprecedented developments in genetic engineering and hormonal manipulation, with important implications for the science of human performance. Great sport begins where good health ends. Bertolt Brecht. "John Hoberman has written another magisterial study of sport... [a] brilliantly crafted narrative." "... I heartily recommend Hoberman's book to serious students and enthusiasts of sport alike. It is a highly readable book that treats some of the most salient and delicate problems that have plagued high-performance sport since its inception. It is, to put it quite simply, one of the most intelligent and perceptive analyses of elite sport that I have had the pleasure of reading." -- William J. Morgan, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 19 (1992): 101, 106 "Two previous books by John Hoberman, Sport and Political Ideology (1984) and The Olympic Crisis (1986), demonstrated his mastery of the European -- and, to a lesser degree, the American -- literature relevant to the history of modern sports. This mastery has enabled him to probe deeply and insightfully into the instrumentalization of the human body in the service of sports performance." "Hoberman's splendidly researched and unusually thoughtful book should be an important contribution to the public debate of this issue. Will it be read by those who have the power to influence events?" -- Allen Guttmann, International Journal of the History of Sport 11 (1994): 516, 517 "Mortal Engines is a horror story. For almost 300 pages John Hoberman presents the reader with evidence that our view of sports and athletes and the attitude athletes have about themselves have become hopelessly and dangerously warped. The lure of money and the determination to establish national prestige have led trainers, scientists and doctors to endanger athletes. Sometimes the athletes have known what was going on, and sometimes they have simply swallowed what they were told was good for them and then kept their mouths shut.... "But the remarkable achievement of Mortal Engines is the extent to which it demonstrates that doped competitors are not so much freaks, cheats or unfortunate victims as they are the logical consequence of a dangerous and destructive set of assumptions which most of us make about our athletes." -- Bill Littlefield on Morning Edition, National Public Radio (NPR), July 27, 1992 "John Hoberman has written a continually fascinating, ingenious and well-narrated book about sport, athletes and the use of science in modern sport from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century. It is a book that should be read by anyone who is interested in sports and physiology or, as one might put it, physiopolitics." -- Mats Gellerfelt, Svenska Dagbladet [Stockholm], February 12, 1994

Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and Dehumanization of Sport

Training

Blackburn Press

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