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DESPAIN: My Take on NASCAR’s Drug Testing Policy
Written by:
Dave Despain
04/14/2008 - 07:25 AM
Charlotte, NC
At Memphis last June, Aaron Fike finished a career-best fifth in a Craftsman Truck Series race and moved up to eighth in series points. Shortly thereafter, he was busted in an amusement park parking lot on drug charges. This week he admitted to heroin addiction and said he shot up every day...including the day of that Memphis race.
How's this for irony? Fike, who's trying to rebuild his racing career, did not run the USAC National Midget race in North Carolina Saturday night because, in the wake of this week's confession, the track was flooded with requests to interview him. Meanwhile, the USAC Western Sprint Car Series race at Roseville, California, was won by ...Shane Hmiel, trying to rebuild his racing career after receiving a life-time suspension from NASCAR - after failing his THIRD drug test. Cory in New York says...
Dave, Harvick is absolutely right. It's time for NASCAR to step up to the plate on this drug testing issue.
Cory
Binghamton, NY
Kevin Harvick was one of several Sprint Cup stars who reacted angrily to Fike's admission this week...angry that NASCAR doesn't test more aggressively. And my reaction to all this? I'm having a flashback...to twenty years ago, when Tim Richmond flunked a NASCAR drug test, ending his career. We later learned that NASCAR's real problem with Richmond was that he had AIDS.
Turns out the drug for which he was busted...was Sudafed, over-the-counter cold medicine. I editorialized at the time that if NASCAR wanted to be a big league sport, it needed a big league drug policy. Well, here we go again.
Given the Tim Richmond history, I am baffled by this week's
Random testing has been the big league norm for years. In contrast, NASCAR tests only when they suspect somebody has a problem. Fike obviously slipped through that net. Though random testing is intended to be a deterrent, it may or may not have kept Fike off the needle and it IS random...he may or may not have been selected, had they tested randomly that fateful day in Memphis. But here's the point....if you're the NASCAR spokesman, asked this week to comment on Fike, don't you want to stand up and say, "We have worked closely with our peers in the other major league sports, learned from their experience, and developed the toughest drug testing program anywhere in sports, and that's the way it should be because our athletes compete at 190 miles-per-hour in a potentially life threatening environment. Here in NASCAR, zero tolerance means exactly that."
But that's not what they said. Faced with headlines reading "NASCAR driver raced after shooting heroin," the various NASCAR statements boiled down to...we've looked at what the other sports do, and the NASCAR way works just fine.
It seems to me that Aaron Fike is the evidence to the contrary and my question remains, what does NASCAR gain by being different?
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