Len Bias would’ve been 50 years old this week. Thanks to Deadpsin for highlighting that “twenty-seven years later we’re still losing our shit over Len Bias,”
Although I don’t accept the entirety of Deadpsin’s hypothesis that all of the 1980-era drug laws resulted from over-reaction to the Bias tragedy, the Deadspin entry and many of the links in their entry are definitely worth a read.
Bias’s death loosed all kinds of terrible ideas on the nation, foremost among them our famously destructive mandatory-minimum sentencing regime, which was enshrined into law in October 1986. It began the process of militarizing the sports world according to the hysterical exigencies of an unwinnable drug war, a process that accelerated when Ben Johnson tested positive for stanozolol at the 1988 summer Olympics in Seoul and turned performance-enhancing drugs into the war’s newest rhetorical front.
Len Bias’s legacy is all around us even still. It’s the cup you have to pee in before starting a new job. It’s the demographic nightmare of crack sentencing. It’s the monthly freakout over recreational drug use among athletes. It’s Barry Bonds on the federal docket, being prosecuted by morons. It’s the ongoing attenuation of our Fourth Amendment rights, helped along by the work of sports league- and media-enabled drug warriors like Jeff Novitzky.
Bias died in 1986 in what may have been the peak of Atlantic Coast Conference Basketball — a time when the league was not yet watered down with too many teams and a time when college basketball programs were not yet decimated by excessive early entries into the NBA. It is hard to argue that the amazing depth of talent the conference experienced from 1984-1986 will ever be duplicated.
