Mitchell Report?

[Richard_Siegel]

Weekly commentary by CBS Evening News chief Washington correspondent and Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer.

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When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was a ballplayer.

We didn't have coaches back then until we got to high school. We learned the game from each other and from copying the major leaguers. We copied everything from their swings to the way they walked.

Because they chewed tobacco, I chewed. It was part of the game.

My dream to be a ballplayer ended but it left me with a heavy addiction to nicotine.

Years ago, I finally beat it, but it was probably the reason I have a disease called ulcerative colitis, and almost certainly the cause for my bladder cancer decades later.

I still take drugs to control the colitis. Surgery got the cancer.

But I can only thank the stars there were no steroids in my younger days.

My baseball dream ended when I hurt my arm in high school and it finally gave out during my first year of college ball.

Had I known of a magic potion that would have made me stronger and kept the dream alive, I would have been no more hesitant to try it than I had been to chew tobacco. If my heroes had done it, that was all I needed to know.

The baseball stars got their names in the paper last week but we buried the lead to this story. Deep in the report it said hundreds of thousands of kids - kids who have the same dream I had - are putting their lives at risk using this stuff.

Who do we blame for that? Where are they getting it? How can their parents and even coaches NOT know?

That's where the follow-up stories should begin.

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