In the spirit of the recent award season, I am unveiling an award of my own, the O.K. Allen Award for Extremely Lazy Thinking. The award is named in honor of Oscar K. Allen, governor of Louisiana from 1932-36. Allen was widely known as a puppet of Senator Huey P. Long, who ran the state from his office in Washington, DC. He was nicknamed “O.K.” because he approved every piece of legislation Long backed, without question or argument. Rumor had it that Allen was in his office one day, signing bills for Long, when a leaf blew in through the window. Allen signed the leaf.
The first recipient of the award is Tim Harford of Slate Magazine, for his egregiously lazy essay “Why New Orleans Won’t Recover.”
His argument starts off with a cheap shot at the band Dire Straits and then makes an assertion that New Orleans is like his stolen CD collection. Huh?
Not taxing a single brain cell, Harford bumbles into his real argument – New Orleans will fail not because it was flooded in a storm but because it was not economically viable before the storm. This could make the foundation of a real argument, if he offered any proof. He weakly proclaims, “Cities have their own trajectories, governed most by the dynamism of their inhabitants and surprisingly little by their physical infrastructure.” I read this and think he is saying a city will survive if its inhabitants have the will to bring it back. Wouldn't’t that be New Orleans? But no. Harford thinks New Orleans will fail because unlike New York, it does not have $1 million apartments. (I’m not kidding; check the article!) By that reasoning, only about a dozen cities in the world can be expected to survive the next decade. Where do you live? You better move to NYC!
Harford breezily dismisses New Orleans as “a charming place for tourists but a desperate clump of poverty and poor schooling.” Oh, slam dunk. So the only two reasons he bothers to offer for New Orleans’ imminent collapse are correctable problems? If poverty and poor schooling are going to render the Crescent City an empty ruin, America has serious problems. New Orleans has never come within a bayou mile of cornering the U.S. market on either, so if New Orleans is going down, apoptosis is coming to a town near you.
In medicine, we have something called a post-mortem. This is an analysis of a dead patient designed to uncover the cause of death, and to help involved individuals learn from the case. But we consider it bad form to carry out an autopsy when the patient is still alive. With a population of 1 million, New Orleans would be the largest ghost town in world history. And none of those million have jobs. Nah.
I think a city that is trying to dig itself out from under a terrible natural disaster deserves better than sloppy journalism. Even if New Orleans is moribund (which I contest), there is no excuse for such shoddiness. Again borrowing a page from medicine, a doctor is not excused from caring for a patient when the patient is dying. In fact, dying is an important stage of life, and it is a serious breach of professional conduct for any health care professional to abandon a patient just because the end is near.
Rooting against a city that is struggling to survive? Buddy, here's an O.K. for you.
A second O.K. Allen Award goes to the lazy sportswriters who gave Olympian Zach Lund a free pass for getting kicked out of the Olympic games. This story is over 6 weeks old, so I will recap: Zach Lund is a skeleton athlete who was told to withdraw from the Olympics because he tested positive for Propecia, an anti-baldness medication.
This award has to be shared among the many shallow-witted sportswriters and sportscasters who echoed the same sentiment: What? Kick somebody out of the Games because he is trying to grow hair? It was mostly a joke in the press, or proof of bureaucratic idiocy, all of which was aided and abetted by Lund’s sheepish grin as he packed his bags and walked out of Turin.
The media did get something right. Most recognized that Propecia (generic name: finesteride) is not used as a steroid itself but as a masking agent that prevents real steroids from showing up on screening tests. Then, the O.K. Allen effect kicked in, and there was thinking no more. Har, har, they said, kicked out of the Olympics for being bald. How stupid can the World Anti-Doping Agency (the organization that suspended him) be?
Actually, not that dumb. The Anti-Doping agency added finesteride to its list of banned substances over a year ago, and hardly made a secret of it. The agency publicly publishes its list, and even maintains a 24-hour hotline to answer any questions about banned drugs. If I am an Olympic athlete, training 40 hours a week in an obscure sport that only sees the light of day every 4 years when the Games come around, I would consider it part of my job to make sure I was eligible to compete. If I were Mr. Lund, every pill, lotion, herbal remedy, and poppy seed would be in the trash can in front of my house 2 months before the Olympics. With so much at stake, why would anyone take any risk at all?
Unless, of course, he was not stupid, but using steroids. Only Zach Lund knows the answer to that question, but it is a mistake to just dismiss Lund as a good ol’ American boy with a little hair loss. Steroid use causes hair loss. I can’t help but feel a little incredulous that a doctor would prescribe Propecia to an Olympic athlete with out at least saying, “You understand that this medication is chemically similar to steroids and might show up on a drug screen.” I know I would.
I learned the hard way in my clinical practice how readily patients lie when it comes to drug abuse. I have seen over 10,000 patients in my 4 year career and can count on one hand the number of people who have said to me, “Doc, I drink too much.” Over 90% of my patients say they do not drink at all, which is simply not possible.
When it comes to illegal drugs, the fibs get more and more fabulous. One patient caught red-handed told me he was at a party and somebody must have put something in his drink. (The same guy died 2 months later from a methadone overdose.) Another said he was with some friends who were smoking “something,” and he wondered if crack particles could waft through the air and preferentially deposit in his poor, innocent lung. (A family member called a few days later and told me this man was selling drugs out of his house.)
The reality is that the caught abuser has no reason to tell the truth, and every incentive to lie until his dying day.
The stereotypical drug abuser is the bum under the bridge, or the crack-addicted prostitute. I have been fooled by many clean-cut, upstanding citizens who just seem too nice to do something so dirty. That is their cover. No one suspects them because, gosh darn it, they are such nice people. In giving them this pass, we grease the path to their destruction.
Steroid abuse is a serious problem in sports, as the latest story about Barry Bonds again illustrates. Lund’s story is proof that the media does not look beneath the surface when it comes to drug use in sports. Such lazy thinking will hurt a lot of people.