Dopers in Uniform: The Hidden World of Police on Steroids

Terry and Jan Todd Series on Physical Culture and Sports

by John Hoberman

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 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.

316 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2017

Reviews

[Oliver Bateman]

a fairly good overview of drug use by police officers, soldiers, etc., but hoberman seems to have rushed on this one. far from developing or researching the anecdotes he provides - the truly interesting parts of police misconduct, the historical meat of the matter - he instead lards the manuscript with lots of bromides about steroids and the users' "toxic masc" qualities (fairly generic stuff, but mother's milk to fellow academics and academic-adjacent media folks post-2016, I suppose)

[Charles Heath]

Remember when your local cop looked like a normal human being, and not some swollen Popeye or Rambo? To my knowledge, Dopers in Uniform is the first extensive study to examine use of force, addiction issues, and illegal drug use by American law enforcement and military members. The literature on steroid and PED usage among police officers has largely been limited to serious journalism. Hoberman relies upon journalism, studies from the social sciences, online chat rooms, public records, and his own extensive research as an historian of society and medicine to expose the anabolic steroid doping culture in law enforcement and the military that has been omitted from decades of public discussion about the doping phenomenon in modern societies.

The research concludes that (probably) large numbers (tens of thousands) of police and military personnel who use these drugs belong to a “global anabolic universe” populated by action-oriented males who belong in turn to an interrelated set of subcultures that have adopted the use of anabolic steroids as muscle-building agents and as a psychogenic stimulant that promotes aggressiveness. The subcultures also include firefighters, mercenaries, action-film stars, bodybuilders, bouncers, motorcycle gangsters, professional wrestlers, martial arts fighters, private security guards, militia members, and overlap creates of a Venn diagram of criminality and shadow criminality.

The present moment of increasing police violence, the Black Lives Matter movement require books like this to help policy makers and leadership to confront the Blue Wall of Silence and the military Code of Honor. How is it that possession and/or distribution of AAS is a felony, yet usage among law enforcement seldom leads to criminal charges, much less a conviction? Powerful unions, complacent leadership, lack of accountability and transparency. To me the research makes perfect sense: one cannot help but agree with the conclusion put forth here that militaristic, authoritarian, aggressive policing, that when coupled with steroid and HGH abuse, lead to a kind of DEVIANCE within law enforcement.

One thread underlying this research is substance abuse among those in uniform in general. Cops and military have 2-4x higher than the general population rate of alcoholism and domestic abuse, and even suicide. Parts of the book would have benefitted from more judicious editing, though this is overcome in the latter two-thirds of the book. The first chapters include some real repetitive boners that seen to be stringed along or run-on without any attention that exact studies or passages were already cited and discussed earlier. Minor cavil.

Fantastic social science here.
Good work by another historian!