Working with St. Joseph Medical Center, Sheppard Pratt Health System’s drug addiction director Mike Gimbel is touring the region giving information and talks about performance-enhancing substances as part of the Powered By Me campaign.

High school athletes in particular tend to overemphasize winning at all costs, and seeing a major professional athlete like Marion Jones confess to doping can be catastrophic, Gimbel said.

Marion Jones claimed she thought she was getting flaxseed oil, but aren’t steroids injected?

You don’t inject flaxseed. I don’t know what the value of flaxseed might be to a runner, but the thing is these are Olympic athletes.

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These are finely tuned athletes. They know exactly what goes into their body at all times. I don’t buy that at all.

How serious is the need for this kind of message in high schools?

I’ve worked with young people in my counseling practice who literally told me that in their game, they made the play that lost the game for their team, and literally, they didn’t go to school for three whole days because they didn’t want to be seen. They didn’t want everyone to remember what happened in the game.

What’s happening in high schools today?

Right now, caffeine products and dietary supplements are the most popular form of supplement when it comes to the gateway to moving up the ladder of performance-enhancing supplements.

Energy drinks are a $7 billion industry. Some of them are about equal to four cups of coffee, but everything else that’s in them is the killer. Guarana, yerba mate and taurine are in virtually every one of them.

When you drink this stuff you feel like you’re shot out of a cannon, because you are. The problem comes in 30 minutes, when what goes up must come down.