The NCAA has reported that sweet lax bros do more drugs across the board than their athlete peers. Well as someone who could have at various points in their young adult life been described as a lax bro I feel compelled to opine a bit on the study and what it points to. Lacrosse is still a nascent sport in most of the country and it still has relatively high financial barriers to entry. Lacrosse players are markedly dissimilar from most of their collegiate peers in that they do not represent a broad socio-economic group and to the extent that sports my trend towards on economic strata, lax would be near the top. My experience within the sport suggests that laxers are best evaluated against their true peer groups, which is not fellow athletes. By in large sweet lax bros inhabit the world of upper middle class white privilege and all the consequence free life experiences that it offers.
It should not be surprising that when one of the three traditional hot beds for the sport is “New England Prep Schools” that the cats who matriculate to NCAA ballin might feel like blowing a few lines is a totally acceptable thing to do.* Boarding school breeds a bizarre cultural fascination with chemical deviance/experimentation (“sweet delay”) especially that of a chemical variety that is both adult in its subject matter but infantile in its consequences (suspension maybe, police never). I would hazard a guess that if you conducted that survey across educationally similar backgrounds and used some baseline alcohol consumption (6-10 drinks/week) that lacrosse players would end up being in lower usage groups for the aforementioned drugs.*
So what’s the take away? Nothing really. Give people a bunch of cash, lower negative outcomes and boundaries are going to be crossed. Especially when those boundaries don’t make a ton of sense to begin with.
*title of the post taken from the humorous back and forth on The Classical
*The analogy to hockey in this context would be inapt. Hockey has a robust network of semi-pro leagues that talented kids can play in straight out of HS thus thinning the HS to college matriculation. Additionally the real prospect of professional employment creates both a larger set of negative consequences for recreational drug use and greater competition within the sport.
*As to steroid usage, people assume that steroid usage can only be linked to a performance enhancing motivation. The kid on my team who would have been user suspect #1 likely did steroids more to fit in within his non-lax social demo (club going, tight shirt wearing, fist pumping, Long Island guidos) than for the strength gains.
