Before this space applies a Pittsburgh-topical ointment that years ago might have helped to clear up the unsightly rash of drug abuse in sports, let's ponder the self-medication question of the week:

What was journeyman Jason Grimsley thinking when he opted for Human Growth Hormone instead of Pat Robertson's age-defying prescription of prayer and protein shakes?

If, as advertised, that miraculous mixture allows a 76-year-old televangelist to leg-press 2,000 pounds, it certainly would have made Grimsley a major-league pitcher with far better career numbers than one Albert Belle covert corked-bat operation, seven different employers and eight players whose names he spilled to authorities as fellow performance-enhancing drug users.

The middling revelation from a middling reliever this week merely serves as another reminder that, folks, the drug apocalypse has been upon our games for a half-century, and it isn't heading near any exits.

Late whistle-blower Steve Courson told you so. Former U.S. Attorney J. Alan Johnson told you so.

Go back two years, to the early spring of 2004. The BALCO case and ensuing Congressional hearings played out without Courson, an expert in the field of performance-enhancing drugs and the first to publicly stand up among the anonymous and say, Hi, I'm Steve, and I used steroids. This long-ago Steelers lineman died last fall while still holding out hope that more of his former teammates and NFL colleagues would step up to admit the same. Word this week of Grimsley's HGH run-in with federal authorities brought Courson to mind. It's a legacy that should continue: Keep Courson's words in mind.

"There are a lot of guys out there who play clean in sports. But, again, I think they're in the minority," Courson said back then, before the full Barry Bonds Monty, before he was finally called to testify in Washington, D.C., before Major League Baseball finally acted on a fraction of its age-old problems.

Grimsley talked about clubhouses, where amphetamines were gulped "like aspirin," and coffee pots that were marked "leaded" (for speed-laced) and "unleaded?" That was until the witch hunt of this past year.

You should no longer act surprised.

Go back 21 years, to the episode that marks this town in sports infamy: The Pittsburgh Drug Trials.

The last player to testify in U.S. v. Curtis Strong, a one-time Pirate and Met named John Milner, attested to getting a liquid amphetamine from the locker of "Willie."

"Willie Mays?" asked Johnson, the defense attorney.

"The Great One, yeah," replied Milner about the man who, coincidentally, is Bonds' godfather.

Another Willie revered in these parts, Stargell, was similarly implicated as such a source for speed, more for "greenies" than Mays' preferred "red juice." Whatever the color, whoever the provider, however the drug was ingested or injected, players of all races, origins and ability used and abused. Still do.

Johnson was left to wonder why the major leagues dropped their balls in 1985 when they should have launched initiatives to try to correct the drug ills that his trials put on painful display. To think, it only took a generation, another federal investigation, a book that unclothes the genie in the needle and Congressional threats to get baseball to begin to fall into the shaky line behind the NFL and Olympics.

Three points never to forget in this unwinnable war on drugs:

There is no spot-on detection test for HGH.

The drug cheats will always, always be ahead of the drug-testers.

The administrators either don't want to, or know they won't, completely clean up their games.

More names of cheats will emerge, perhaps less from the powerless George Mitchell investigation than the ongoing federal probe related to BALCO. So what are we left to do? Oh, the administrators will keep trying to eliminate the cheats, if not for the clean minority then for our children with athletes' posters on their walls. And the fans will keep buying the tickets and jerseys and baubles -- sports is an entertainment business, after all -- but, at least from now on, they should be a more cynical, informed consumer when they swallow the bitter-aftertaste pill our games have become. And will continue to be, in a society where Courson was offered HGH in his 40s as an anti-aging therapy. Somewhere in the afterlife, he's still laughing over that one.