Lars Anderson: To play ‘mortal,’ or not? My experience trying Adderall as a PED

BOSTON - OCTOBER 4: Boston Red Sox player Aaron Hill, shrouded in shadow, hits the ball during a workout at Fenway Park in Boston on Oct. 4, 2016, before the team leaves for for Cleveland for the first game of the American League Division Series.  (Photo by Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
By Lars E. Anderson
Dec 3, 2019

Those four days would have made Perseus cringe. They’d included an extra-inning night game, the patented – dreaded – six-hour Japanese practice, and a road doubleheader. What little was left of me as I hobbled off our home field in Kochi, Japan, following batting practice of the fourth day was wholly haggard and half asleep. But the fun was just getting started: We had yet another day-night doubleheader.

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For those unfamiliar with Shikoku Island in Japan: It rains. A lot. And with the first half of the 2017 season winding down, all of those rain-canceled and shortened games had to be accounted for, much to the chagrin of myself and the other Gai-Jin (foreigners) on the team.

My Japanese teammates didn’t seem to mind, but that did not surprise me. Up to that point in the season, they had displayed an ability to summon energy previously unthinkable to mere grinders like me. Eighteen innings of baseball after full batting practice sessions barely seemed to register with them, but I was just your average American dude. I couldn’t hang, and at this juncture of the season, my tolerance for caffeine had reached Hunter Thompson levels, my sleep fitful, my body exhausted from our marathon practices. My inner reserves were tapped out and I had nothing left. By the time I’d trudged into our musty clubhouse beneath the first base stands, I wanted to cry … then have the local doc induce a coma.

As I debated whether I should fake injury, illness, or death to avoid playing the double-header, an angel — who will remain nameless — appeared. In his hands, the miracle I needed in the form of a little white pill. In his mouth, a question: “You want an Adderall?”

Of course I did … and I didn’t. Adderall, a controlled substance and a banned stimulant in the United States, is often prescribed to those who suffer from attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For that reason, those who test positive in U.S. baseball without a “therapeutic use exemption” (TUE) are hit with an 80-game suspension (a number that has increased over the years). So despite my need, I still waffled on whether to pop the pill. After a 10-year career in affiliated baseball, including countless drug tests, I had been conditioned to think two things.

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1. This was cheating

2. I could get caught.

Despite those reservations, I had always been curious what baseball would be like with some “assistance.” I never felt tempted to use steroids or human growth hormone, but Adderall was different. My interest had been piqued ever since a Double-A teammate, who had a TUE for Adderall, told me before one game, “Larsie, I’m playing ‘mortal’ today.”

“Mortal?” I asked.

“Yeah, I didn’t take my Adderall,” he responded, grinning. “Usually I can read the pitcher’s mind, but today I’m actually going to have to see the ball first to know what pitch he’s throwing.”

He assured me he was only half-joking.

Maybe it was the exhaustion, or the fact that I was 29, five years removed from my last major league appearance, and playing less for the $1,500 a month in a faraway land, but my inner moral reservations about cheating dissolved. It felt more like an experiment.

I asked a couple of teammates about drug testing by the league, and the answers were inconclusive (after two months, we had not been tested, nor, as it turned out, were we tested for the rest of the year). I made my decision. “I guess we’ll try immortality then,” I thought before plopping the pill in my mouth and washing down with my 36th iced coffee of the day.

Then, I waited.

Once the first game started, the effects were immediate. Forget the “Miracle on Ice,” it was time for the “Miracle-on-All-Dirt-Japanese-Infields.” Leading up to that point, I’d been struggling at the plate. Not anymore. Over the course of the doubleheader, I went 12 for 7 (OK, really 5 for 7, including a home run and two doubles), but not hitting the ball hard became difficult. When I stood in the on-deck circle, my old friend Performance Anxiety was conspicuously absent, and I marveled at what it felt like to walk to the plate without giving his bloated ass a piggyback ride, too. He managed to stay on vacation for each at-bat. It was just me and the ball. The fielders didn’t exist, and the pitcher had turned from rottweiler to pug.

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And my body? You know, the one with the knees that groaned from patellar tendonitis more persistent than bed bugs in a tropical two-star hostel and a left throwing shoulder more frayed than George Donner’s psyche? Those maladies were nowhere to be found, either. My knees felt like they had been cast in deer antler velvet by Lance Armstrong’s medical staff. My left shoulder felt like it had been, well, cast in deer antler velvet by Lance Armstrong’s medical staff.

I had boundless amounts of easily-controlled energy. In fact, the idea of sleep or rest was repulsive. Who was that bum in the locker room after batting practice, groveling about being tired? Why would anyone ever need sleep? (As I discovered later that night, however, the Adderall + Sleep equation is quite an imperfect formula.)

But the most striking difference was my inner state: All I wanted to do — all I cared about in the moment — was baseball. I wasn’t worried about what my manager thought about me (he wasn’t a fan ). I didn’t berate myself when I missed a meaty fastball (throughout my career, I often wasn’t a fan of me, either). I wasn’t off in La La Land, thinking about the new Lane 8 song or what I’d be eating after the game instead of focusing on holding the runner at first base. I was utterly in the moment. And what a relief it was. There was a clear mission: Win this next pitch. And then the next one. And the next one. There was no tomorrow, only the everlasting now.

Later that night, as I sat in my so-not-built-for-a-6-foot-4-man Japanese apartment, I reflected on my performance. It didn’t take long before I came to the same conclusion that I had come to many times before: Adderall is, in no uncertain terms, a wonderful PED … for those allowed to use it.

Aubrey Huff, the former World Series champion for the San Francisco Giants, recalled his days using Adderall in a 2017 interview with San Francisco radio station KNBR: “You just felt mentally invincible … What’s the biggest thing in baseball you need in order to be successful? Your mind, right? Steroids aren’t going to make your mind stronger. But these Adderall things? My focus was laser-sharp, the air was clean, it was crisp, every fan was like in 3-D. I mean everything around me … the ball looked bigger. Oh, I felt amazing! I could go 0-4 and it did not affect me.”

You show me a baseball player who isn’t affected by going 0-4 and I’ll show you a liar … or, apparently, a player taking Adderall.

Adderall felt great. I knew that. And I played spectacularly on it. But that was the end of my experience with it. So why didn’t I seek out more? Well, like anything else, it’s complicated. I’d experienced the lack-of-sleep issue. And I worried about a suspension. But I knew, vaguely, that there were other downsides, too.

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WebMD classifies Adderall as a drug that “can help increase your ability to pay attention, stay focused on an activity, and control behavior problems. It may also help you to organize your tasks and improve listening skills.”

Those same quick Google searches will tell you it also causes heart problems. Anxiety issues. Increased blood pressure. Abuse it for too long, and the list gets worse. And, again, you’re cheating if you take it without cause.

But that didn’t stop many of my peers.

I was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 2006, which was coincidentally the inaugural year of MLB’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. Lucky me. In addition to players being tested for anabolic steroids, the oft-enjoyed, clubhouse favorite “greenie” (basically, an amphetamine/Adderall) was now off-limits. The days of pre-game clubhouse coffee spiked with pre-game speed were finished.

Enter the TUE. Almost immediately and comically, players went legit, in the form of Adderall prescriptions. In 2014, Gregg Doyle of CBS Sports wrote that doctors estimated 4.4 percent of the adult population would qualify for an Adderall prescription (the percentage actually taking the medication, of course, was much smaller), yet the previous year 9.9 percent of MLB players actually had a prescription. Those pesky overnight bus rides or day/night doubleheaders were no match for those armed with that magic white pill. So another uneven playing field had been created.

Did I miss out? Should I have thought about trying this sooner, looking to join the group that might have gotten a little help, when they didn’t need it? Was it really that easy to just land an Adderall prescription, and then never have to play ‘mortal’ again?

I asked someone who knew better than I did. And it turns out the process by which baseball players acquire Adderall prescriptions is relatively thorough — and comes with its own set of problems. In a recent phone interview, Matt Paré, a former minor league catcher with the San Francisco Giants organization who lives with ADHD, shed some light for me on what it took to acquire a TUE.

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“I already had an Adderall prescription when I signed with the Giants as a free agent in 2013,” Paré said. “At that time, in order to continue taking Adderall, I had to talk with an MLB-approved psychiatrist. After our consultation ended, he agreed that a prescription was appropriate, and he said that in his report that he sent to the head doctor of the MLB drug program. That doctor had the final say in my case, and I was ultimately allowed to continue my prescription.”

The oversight didn’t stop there. “The length of my TUE was basically one year, starting in March,” Paré continued. “Each spring training, in order to renew the TUE, I would have a one-on-one meeting with the same psychiatrist that I saw initially, just to make sure everything was on the up-and-up.”

But for Paré, the concern was never the threat of MLB rescinding his TUE and subsequent Adderall prescription. Rather, it was MLB’s insistence that he take the stimulant each and every day. “Once you’re prescribed Adderall, you actually have to test positive for it when you’re drug tested,” he said.

The reason? Paré believes that MLB, out of concern for players using, or appearing to use, Adderall as a PED, wants proof that the player is taking in the medication regularly.

“If a player is using Adderall every day, it looks more like he really needs it as opposed to just using it when he plays,” he said. “If he’s using it inconsistently, then it seems more like he’s taking it for a competitive advantage like a PED.”

It is to MLB’s insistence on taking Adderall every day that Paré, who is now retired, still takes exception. “Take this with a grain of salt because I’m not a medical professional, but in my experience, I’m not sure if it’s a good thing to take Adderall with such consistency, especially over long periods of time,” he said. “I don’t think we know enough about the long-term effects of stimulants to force players to do that. I didn’t want to take Adderall each day as there were times when I was OK with living with my condition and taking a break from medication, but I was kind of between a rock and a hard place because not taking it would’ve meant that I would have to forfeit my TUE. I feel that MLB using a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for players’ health. They’re unintentionally making life harder for some of their players.”

Paré softened my long-standing opinion that the downsides to taking Adderall as a baseball player were no big deal. The side effects of Adderall are legitimately not pretty, especially for professional athletes. Add loss of appetite, headaches, dizziness, insomnia, and weight loss to the list of possible negative side effects. Paré was quick to point to those negatives — some of which he experienced —as reasons why Adderall should not be considered a PED.

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“I definitely would have preferred to have a regular appetite, not be dehydrated, and have the ability to get to sleep quickly,” Pare said. “None of that came easy on Adderall, and those are all pretty important when it comes to performance. Something that also frustrated me was teammates giving me a hard time about taking the medication. Some resented me, a couple called me a cheater.”

Obviously, Pare had a real issue. But there are certainly those without a TUE who take matters into their own hands. They use the drug in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage — or in their minds, at least level the playing field. What’s disconcerting is that if one picks his spots wisely, it’s relatively difficult to test positive for Adderall.

According to American Addiction Centers, Adderall is only detectable in urine up to four days. A blood test? Just 46 hours. Given the sporadic nature of MLB drug testing (both urine and blood) and the limited time that Adderall stays in one’s system, it would take bad luck, bad timing, or wildly poor judgment to get popped for this particular substance.

That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, however, as each year players test positive for “amphetamines.” Often, this simply means a player was taking Adderall without a prescription. In 2014, Orioles first baseman Chris Davis was suspended 25 games for testing positive for Adderall. He had a TUE for Adderall in 2013 but it was not renewed. He had a career year in 2013, hitting 53 home runs and slashing .286/.370/.634.  By the time he was suspended in 2014, when there were 17 games left in the season, he had 26 home runs in 127 games and sported an anemic line of .196/.300/.404. In 2015, he received a TUE for a different ADHD drug, Vyvanse. He bounced back with a .262/.361/.561 stat line.

So how, in 2014, did Davis procure a drug that he no longer had a prescription for? I don’t know about his specific case, but it’s not as if Adderall is the Bigfoot of narcotics. I have seen teammates with TUEs give their Adderall to teammates without a prescription. I’ve seen players take their siblings’ pills. Hell, I was able to cop the damn thing in Japan, where it’s technically illegal even to possess the drug.

And there are incentives for some players to make the wrong choice. The ethics of MLB and its organizations’ role in fostering maximal player performance has always been complicated. Team-employed doctors making decisions about players is a somewhat obvious, albeit unavoidable, conflict of interest. Along with MLB’s insistence that a player take Adderall every day, organizations also have the power to influence a player’s drug intake. One source, a minor league player who wished to remain anonymous, told me that his team actually paid for his Adderall prescription. To be fair, that organization paid for all of their player’s team-sanctioned prescriptions, but a cynic might observe that such an organization, especially given the financial strain of many minor leaguers, is enabling players to take a drug that might not be all that healthy, but will, in all likelihood, aid in performance — thus helping the organization.

Like anything worth agonizing over, Adderall’s role in professional baseball is both inundated with complexity and saturated in grey. Due to my brief experience using Adderall, as well as years spent listening to teammates laud its attributes, in my playing days you would have found me in the clubhouse resenting the Matt Paré’s of the world for being allowed to take it. What’s more, I’ve often thought or spoken aloud that if one player should be able to use it, everyone should, or vice versa.

But as I’ve thought more about it, talked about it, examined it, my own self-righteousness has (thankfully) eased. I’ve been reminded that rarely are black and white solutions or points of view useful or appealing, especially when it comes to drugs. A substance used properly might be both therapeutic and medicinal. The same substance used improperly, however, could lead to abuse, addictions, or physical harm.

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Is it fair that some players are allowed to take a stimulant while others are not? Maybe not. But would it be fair to deny a player with a legitimate, longstanding medical condition the medication that would help him function both on and off the field? Equally problematic. We know these are tough questions, those vexing gray areas. The real question when discussing Adderall in baseball concerns just where the line is, and at what point something becomes an unfair competitive advantage.

We all agree that athletes with poor eyesight should be allowed to wear glasses or contacts; we also generally agree that competitors should not be allowed to inject anabolic steroids that turn them into the Hulk. But the fact remains that there is a world that exists between those two poles that is far more nuanced and not easily navigable, and we — even those of us who tried it — are still working out where Adderall fits.

(Top Photo: Jim Davis / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

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