Steve Howe died way too young. He was 48 when his pick-up truck rolled over on a road in Coachella, California, around dawn on the morning of April 28 [2006]. Riverside County authorities said Howe was doing 70 mph. They even drug-tested him in death. The autopsy was inconclusive but the toxicology report has been sent to a lab for analysis and one day this summer we’ll hear or read a brief item to the effect that Steve Howe, once the best relief pitcher in baseball, rookie of the year when he came up with the Dodgers in 1980, did or did not have an illegal metabolite in his system.
I interviewed him in the summer of 1986 on the sun-baked diamond where the San Jose Bees were loosening up before a game. The Bees were a a motley collection of D-league professional baseball players, rehabbing ex-major leaguers (Mike Norris, Ken Reitz, Derrel Sconiers and Howe), and four Japanese prospects who spoke almost no English.
Howe was affable and restless. His lawyer was standing by, smoking a cigar, as he answered my questions. He grew up in Pontiac, Michigan. He said his social group was “pretty tough guys” who all did drugs and all did time. Howe said he didn’t do drugs or alcohol as a teenager. He thought pot might take the edge off his athletic skills –he knew he was great– and he didn’t like the effect that alcohol had on his father. He said he first did coke one night in New York City after pitching against the Mets. A woman offered him a line and he thought it would pose no problems because “It reminded me of all the Ritalin I’d done as a kid.”
The lawyer cut in with a commentary: “Okay, you’re a kid in New York alone, you’ve just won the big game, you’re a hero, but you’re alone in a hotel room with nothing to do but read Schopenhauer. A beautiful woman calls and says, ‘Come fuck my brains out.’ What would you rather do –you’re a kid in New York– go fuck a beautiful woman or stay home alone and read Schopenhauer?”
I said, “Ritalin? You just said you didn’t do drugs or alcohol as a kid.” Howe repeated that he hadn’t. Ritalin, in his view, was “medication” because it had been administered by a school nurse, with a doctor’s blessing, in the principal’s office.
Ritalin is the brand name for methylphenidate HCl, a form of speed designed by chemists to be just different enough from amphetamine for exclusive licensing by Ciba-Geigy, the drug company now known as Novartis. Use of Ritalin had flattened in the late 1970s after Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky published their brilliant expose, ‘The Myth of the Hyperactive Child.’ But by the mid-1980s the drug was being pushed successfully in the schools, its use justified by a pharmacological falsehood, i.e., that it had a “paradoxical effect” on the young, calming them down. In fact there is no fundamental physiological change that occurs in the brain during adolescence, and Ritalin has the same effect on adults as it does on kids. It is the classic effect of speed --focusing one’s attention on whatever is directly in front of one’s face, and causing all the expected side-effects, such as sleeplessness, loss of appetite and increasing jitters as it wears off. Ritalin and similar stimulants are now prescribed daily for more than five million American kids.
Doctors no longer rely on “the paradoxical effect” to rationalize prescribing strong speed to kids. For several decades its validity was espoused by pill-pushing addiction specialists and accepted by doctors whose faith in “the medical literature” is unwavering. Did we hear any apologies as its absurdity became apparent? Of course not.
After hearing Howe’s story, I started picking up on similar stories (anecdotal evidence, but lots of it). I looked in vain for a study correlating Ritalin use in childhood and cocaine use in adulthood until I was put in touch with a UC Berkeley psychology professor, Nadine Lambert, who had been tracking people who took Ritalin in childhood. Lambert shared her findings in what would become a 26-year longitudinal study showing that Ritalin use seems to predispose for stimulant use down the road. It’s just common sense that if you give kids a “medication,” the effects of which are supposedly beneficial, and then take it away at age 16, a certain number are going to try to reproduce those familiar “beneficial” effects. Lambert saw Ritalin as a quick fix used with the consent of overwhelmed parents and beneficial only for overwhelmed teachers and unrighteous school administrators. What kids with “attention deficit disorder” need is attention, she said, which doesn’t come in the form of a pill.
Two days before Howe’s car crash, Nadine Lambert died when her car was struck by a dump truck near the UC Berkeley campus. According to her obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Lambert was instrumental in advocating the view that school psychologists should work with teachers to improve the classroom environment to help children succeed, a more successful intervention than simply pulling students out of class for testing or counseling because the number of school psychologists is so limited.
“Professor Lambert also published a controversial study in 1999 showing that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who were treated with stimulant drugs such as Ritalin were more likely to smoke cigarettes earlier and more heavily and were more likely as adults to abuse cocaine. Her findings -based on a 30-year study of 492 children, half of whom had ADHD- raised questions about the risks of Ritalin and similar drugs.”
When I met him Howe had just moved to Whitefish, Montana, which he thought would be a great place to raise a family. The local Drug Warriors insulted him in 1999 when he offered to be one of the four coaches on his daughter’s school softball team. The Whitefish Superintendent of Schools, a man named Dan Peters, turned him down. Peters must have seen his office as an extension of Major League Baseball, which suspended Howe six times for cocaine use before finally banning him in 1997. Howe appealed to the County Superintendent to overrule the ban. “A lot of damage is being done to these kids and to the program,” Howe commented at the time. “And for what reason, I don’t know.” The County Superintendent ruled that she didn’t have jurisdiction because the appeal wasn’t filed with her office within 30 days of Howe’s rejection. Howe and the Whitefish Softball Association (the other parents) then appealed to the State Superintendent, who affirmed that the original appeal had not been filed on time. School administrators promoted Steve Howe’s addiction to stimulants in his youth and school administrators punished him for it in adulthood.
So Whitefish wasn’t such a great place for the Howe family, after all. At the time of his death, according to Howe’s obit, he resided in Valencia, California. He was driving home from a business trip to Arizona when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel. The business involved making and marketing “an all-natural, high-energy soft drink.” Which sounds like a drink Steve Howe himself could have used and truthfully endorsed.
Howe made it back to the big leagues, as did Mike Norris –for a minute. Norris had already had surgery by the time he landed in San Jose. An elevated dark-purple scar ran like a mountain range across the top of his shoulder and down his right arm. Big-league scouts — paunchy middle-aged men in fishing hats — sat in the stands with speed guns, measuring his fastball, which was about 83 mph. “But I’ve developed three speeds on my curve,” said Norris, hopefully. The ‘86 San Jose Bees’ season could be the basis for a good movie, but Hollywood would do it as a comedy, undoubtedly, and it really wasn’t.
Be First to Comment