A Male Problem? : Substance Abuse Among Women Is Less Than Among Men--and It’s Almost Always Alcohol

At the height of her career on the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. tour, between 1964 and 1975, Carol Mann won 38 tournaments. The 6-foot 3-inch blonde from Maryland was known for her powerful swing, strong irons and knack for winning.

What the LPGA and Women’s Sports Foundation Hall of Famer was never known for was her problem with alcohol and amphetamines.

As a child of alcoholic parents, she was already a strong risk to have her own drinking problem. As a top golfer, she used alcohol in her celebrations, to relieve the loneliness of the women’s tour and to escape her own failings.

“I used alcohol as a relaxer and an escape from my own performance,” Mann said. “I celebrated victory with it. When I won my first tournament, I popped every cork on a few cases of champagne for the media. I used it for joy as well as pain. Usually, when I didn’t do well, my habit was to have some beer.”

Mann has been a recovering alcoholic since her mother was admitted to the Betty Ford Clinic in 1981, where Mann discovered her own problem with alcohol.

“They had family week there, and when I went to family week, I thought I was going to discuss my mother’s problem,” Mann said. “But the facts are, I went to learn about me and how I have responded to the illness. . . . I have not used alcohol for about 10 years, nor do I intend to.

“When I was trying to become successful early in my career, the first seven years, there was a lot of pain of failure. While that pain was significant, I really used it as a motivator. I was willing to keep (working on my game) more so I wouldn’t keep being in pain. When I started being more successful, I started taking pills amphetamines, although that was only for a short period.”

The list of male athletes whose lives and playing careers have been marred by drug and alcohol abuse is long. Former Maryland basketball star Len Bias, former Houston Rockets guard Lewis Lloyd and New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor stand out from the last 15 months, and drug violators detected in the recent Pan American Games were men. Mann stands virtually alone as a top woman athlete who has had drug or alcohol problems.

From all appearances, the use of chemical substances--recreational and performance-enhancing drugs and alcohol--by female athletes is neither as prevalent nor as widely known as the use of chemical substances by male athletes.

“Frankly, for me as a women’s athletic director, the use of drugs in women’s sports is not a major concern,” said Judith Holland, women’s athletic director at UCLA. “There are too many other things I have to be concerned about that are more pressing problems.”

Holland said that among the 17- to 23-year-old female athletes she deals with, eating disorders are a more pertinent problem.

“The woman in athletics is basically invisible,” she said. “I suppose in some cases, particularly when you read about so many (male) athletes’ drug problems, that’s good.”

Although there are no reliable statistics comparing drug use among female athletes to drug use among male athletes, many involved in drug testing and women’s athletics hold that although drug use among women athletes exists, it is not nearly as extensive as among male athletes.

Of 273 women athletes surveyed in a study done by Hazelden-Cork, a chemical abuse clinic in Minneapolis, with the cooperation of the Women’s Sports Foundation, almost all reported having used alcohol at some point, 76% used alcohol in the last 30 days, and more than 90% reported that they had never used cocaine or marijuana. Only 1% reported using cocaine more than once, and none reported using anabolic steroids.

Results from the study, which were released in July, included responses from professional and amateur, retired and active female athletes. The study is the first attempt to paint a broad picture of chemical abuse among female athletes.

Dr. Robert Murphy, the outgoing chairman of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.’s drug education committee and a member of the drug-testing committee at Ohio State University, said that in the three years Ohio State has administered three-times yearly drug tests to its athletes, no female athlete has tested positive. Among male athletes, the positive test response has dropped from 8% in the first year to 5% in the second and 2% in the third.

“Although in our experience there appears to be less use among women than among men, we think that when we test more frequently, we will get a similar pattern of use among women (as among men), but about half the incidence,” Murphy said. “I think that as time goes on, we’ll find some (drug) use among women, but not as much as the men.”

The relative absence of drug use among female athletes apparently hinges mainly on the status of women’s athletics and the professional athletic opportunities open to women. Most female athletes do not have the economic wherewithal to be frequent drug users.

“There’s simply not a lot of money involved with (women’s athletics),” Holland said. “I think money, in a lot of ways, is the root of all evil. Although I’d like to see the (money) become more fair and more equitable, in this case maybe it’s good for women athletes.”

Cheryl Miller, the All-American women’s basketball player and Olympic gold medalist from USC, said that in her playing years she didn’t notice any chemical abuse among female athletes.

“I think anytime there is a lot of drug abuse, it probably affects women as well,” Miller said. “But I don’t think it’s as much of a problem as in men’s sports. I think (one of the reasons male athletes have more problems) is that it’s more available to men. In the professional ranks, you can afford drugs. Not too many women can afford it.

“Most women feel like you aren’t going to have a professional athletic career. We’re looking out for what our other career will be.”

Only in tennis and golf can women pursue lucrative professional careers. But tennis and golf have never been known for having players with chemical-abuse problems. Whereas professional football, basketball and baseball teams have drug testing and drug-counseling programs and hardly a day goes by without a report of an athlete in those sports being involved in a drug- or alcohol-related incident, professional golf and tennis are relatively clean.

“There’s sort of an end to women’s athletics at the college level,” said Dr. John Lombardo, a sports medicine specialist at the the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio who works with the Inner Circle, the drug-counseling program of the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns. “There’s not much for women professionally. The high-risk sports are football, basketball, baseball and hockey, where there’s a great deal of money involved. Players in these sports seem to have more temptation, more access to drugs.

“As far as women athletes at the high school and college level, there is still a different drive for playing the sport. For men, there’s the added carrot of the professional career. Women know that’s not their life. The sport is a big part of their life, but they have a different attitude toward playing the game. They always play because they like it. There’s not the extra lure of money.”

The professional organizations in women’s golf and tennis don’t perceive any kind of drug problem among their athletes. The LPGA currently has no drug-counseling or drug-education program, but the Women’s International Tennis Assn. is instituting a series of drug-education seminars.

Merrett R. Stierheim, WITA executive director, said the seminars will be mandatory and that drug testing is under review by the association’s board of directors and medical committee, but no decision will be made immediately.

Trish Falkner, a player services representative for the WITA, said the drug education seminars are aimed at preventing a chemical abuse problem from surfacing on the women’s professional tour.

“We really think, looking at our staff and our trainer and the contact they have with the players, we would know if any of our players are drug users,” Falkner said. “We just know we don’t have a problem. That’s not to say that down the line at some point we won’t, with all of the pressures society is putting on us. We’re not ignoring the possibility of a problem in the future, we’re just not in any great hurry.”

In her 1986 autobiographical account of life on the women’s tennis tour, Pam Shriver said that women tennis players were too “cheap” to buy drugs.

Although part tongue-in-cheek, Shriver’s statement captures the difference between individual sports, such as golf and tennis, and team sports, such as football and baseball. In individual sports, an athlete’s playing income depends on his or her performance at each event, but in team sports, an athlete’s playing income is based on a contract, which may be supplemented by individual performance incentives.

Chris Evert, who is WITA president and active in Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug program, said she is supportive of the approach the WITA is taking.

“Our emphasis as an association is on education,” she said. “We don’t feel there is a problem.”

The primary figures involved in the Hazelden study--Karla Hill-Donisch of Hazelden, Deborah Anderson, executive director of the WSF, and Mann, president of the WSF, also say they believe that education is the best route to take with women athletes.

“I think that the results didn’t really surprise us at all,” Hill-Donisch said. “There are not a lot of women (athletes) who are substance abusers. But I think that women are looking for more information about women and chemical use, that came out loud and clear.”

Eighty-six percent of the respondents said they wanted more information on women and chemical abuse.

Although Anderson said she views the results as good news, she also said that there is no room for complacency in dealing with the chemical dependency of female athletes. Barbara Hedges, women’s athletic director at USC, agrees.

“I think the problems that have occurred have focused on the male athletes, but I don’t see a big difference in the orientation between men and women that would lead to drug use only among men,” Hedges said.

“It would be presumptuous to say women don’t have the problems men do. We should continue to be vigilant. The media is not out of line in being vigilant. I see our testing program, the other collegiate testing programs and NCAA testing as a positive step, but we can’t sit back and rest on the fact we’ve been successful.”

And as Mann points out, women in general and female athletes are more likely to have problems with legally obtained prescription drugs and alcohol than recreational drugs, such as cocaine and marijuana.

Mann said she is out of touch now with what chemical abuse programs might exist on the LPGA tour--the drug and alcohol problems of golfer Muffin Spencer-Devlin were linked to her mood swings triggered by sugar imbalance and were treated by a Santa Barbara nutritionist before she even qualified for the LPGA tour. But Mann said she hopes that more female athletes will look at their own alcohol and drug behavior problems as the Hazelden study receives more attention.

“I’ve had to broaden my scope,” Mann said. “I feel I have a responsibility to the whole of women’s sports. The main thing that (the WSF) wanted to do with co-sponsoring the event at Hazelden was to open up the topic so that more and more women athletes would take a look at their behaviors, and it has occurred and it will occur.”