NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland – USA Today columnist Christine Brennan said Wednesday that the nation’s media have done “a terrible job” of reporting the abuse of performance-enhancing drugs in athletics.

Speaking at an educational session titled “Performance Enhancement Issues and Ethics” at the NCAA Convention, she said that the most important story she has covered in her career was when Canadian Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100-meter dash gold medal at the 1988 Olympics after he tested positive for steroids.

Johnson’s fall marked a transition from state-sponsored performance enhancement to a time when individuals sought to gain a significant competitive edge through the drug use. She lauded the Olympics for addressing the problem, contrasting its efforts with that of Major League Baseball, which she said continues to lag.

Brennan said most people don’t understand the difference, knowing only that both entities have testing programs in place. She said, however, that they are like day and night and that the media is to blame for that misperception.

Frank Urasyz, president of the National Center for Drug Free Sport (which administers the NCAA testing program), said that college athletics has its own issues with education. Only 65 percent of NCAA programs have drug-education programs, he said, and institutional personnel at many institutions endorse the use of potentially harmful dietary supplements.

Moreover, Uryasz also noted that a new problem is emerging as more athletes abuse prescription medication.

Young people, including athletes, too commonly share medication with one another, steal medication from their parent’s medicine cabinets or use medication intended for another purpose to gain a competitive advantage.

In the latter case, Uryasz noted that athletes increasingly will be obligated to demonstrate, for instance, that medication prescribed for attention deficit disorder is what is medically necessary. NCAA staff member Mary Wilfert said that such rationale will require more than a simple note from a doctor.

Nobody should feel guilty about any of this, said ethicist Tom Murray of New York’s Hastings Center. He noted that while elaborate arguments commonly are constructed to defend performance enhancement, they ultimately are not supported by what the purpose of sport is intended to be (the talents that people bring into the world and what they do to perfect those talents).