Charlie Hodge

The continual rise in drug overdose deaths in the Valley and recent news stories regarding deaths or debilitation connected to sports related injuries, pain killers, and other pharmaceutical drugs or pills have been swirling and festering in my brain. The correlation between injuries and supposed cures or relief seem like a dangerous cocktail or fatal soup.

The ‘relief’ is too often turning to grief.

There’s certainly some deadly truth suggesting growing up in today’s world is a much more dangerous scenario then a generation ago. Is it ironic that some of the greatest health threats are found in the competitive, supposedly healthy world of sports?

The stress and pressure to succeed in high level sports and the access to ‘top end high performance’ solutions certainly seems a formula for sorrow if not addiction and eventually death.

I cried some tears for a few lost friends when viewing a documentary on concussions suffered by pro athletes. The irony hit me that despite the increase in pay and power athletes now receive (compared to decades ago), the respect for their health and lives outside of the games has not. We still use and abuse them with the same reckless disrespect. Our pleasure is their pain.

My dear friend Gene Carr is just one small example of pain for gain and losing everything at the end. A former Junior A superstar in ÁðÁ§ÉñÉç with the Buckaroos, Gene went on to an eight-year NHL career before debilitating pain and injury finally ended his playing days. A bent and crippled man Gene fought the pain and several back operations to relieve the pain. It never worked.

He recently died soon after a major back surgery — a fear he shared with me prior to getting it done.

As a society our propensity to place athletes, actors, musicians, etc on absurd podiums of God-like proportions callously continues despite the awareness and history of the sorts of abuse that is contained within such adoration. We continue to blur the lines between reality and expectation with deadly consequence.

We shake our heads at the ‘barbaric’ sagas when athletes were treated like garbage by team owners, shipped to the minors, forced to do whatever was asked to make the team or stay in the pros. Books and movies have constantly portrayed the pressure on athletes or actors to find the elixir or edge needed. Yet we’ve done very little to resolve it.

Recently I watched former NHL enforcer Mike Peluso tearfully admit how fighting nearly killed him. Yes, Peluso made his choice to fight, however my experience involved with junior hockey clarified the reality of how things work on the ice and in the dressing room. The house rules were simple — if you want the glory you pay the price. Fighting, pain killers, performance enhancing drugs are often the offered and chosen solutions. While not as predominant as in the past, for many players there is no such thing as switch or fight. It is fight or get out of the game.

The pressure on athletes to toughen up or take a walk is simply the tip of the iceberg today.

As a teenager steroids and other ‘health improvements or enhancers’ were starting to raise their ugly heads. Today, in the world of contact sports, body building, track and field etc. it is rare to find someone who is not on something in order to make them bigger, faster, tougher. The pressure for young people to meet or exceed the competition is even nastier. Today the game is deadly.

Complicating the scenario is the risk of injury, or often even worse, recovering from the injury. Between addictive pain pills and prescriptions to quickly overcome the wound and return to work, athletes are caught in a quagmire of life-threatening choices.

I do not have to look far for a personal example of such sorrow. Despite my emphysema, I try to refuse any pain medication or drugs with the exception of my puffers. I have a bag of T-3’s at home but never take them. Of recent I am prescribed prednisone for my occasional CO2 life threatening flair ups.

I am constantly offered a bundle of goodies from the medical profession to ease the problems however my experience will not let me go there. I am already addicted to morphine and cocaine and never want to see either again. The majority of ‘relief’ medication offered is suspect to me and yet a perfectly healthy, organic option of a tea that I can use which improves my breathing tremendously is banned from this country by the pharmaceutical industry.

Today’s youth not only face all the same pressure and temptation that our generation did, but now face even greater death at first kiss with such crap as OxyContin and the nightmare Fentanyl.

There was a time where if you wanted to get high you hung around a seedy bar, hung out at the high school parking lot, or roamed downtown. Now you go to the gym, the walk-in clinic, or an elementary school. Scary.

Solution?

A good place to start is for all athletic leagues and bodies to make overhaul changes to guidelines for athletes, changing of rules (ban fighting etc.), and stringent drug testing. It is time for team owners and managers to stand up and be accountable.