Len Bias and historical counterfactuals

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the death of former University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias from a cocaine-induced heart attack. For sports fans of my age group, this is a significant where-were-you-when moment (I was at home studying for my last high school final exams). It was the subject of one of the best of ESPN's 30-for-30 documentaries and Bill Simmons talks about it as the singular event that changed the course of the Boston Celtics and all of the NBA through the late '80s and '90s. And it was a major catalyst for Congress creating the crack/powder disparity that still plagues federal sentencing law.

The assumption always is that Bias would have been an NBA superstar. He was the immediate heir to Larry Bird and would have kept the Boston Celtics (who had just won the NBA title) at the top of the league. And he would have been the truly worthy and equal rival to Michael Jordan in the 1990s. But I always have wondered whether that assumption is correct.

We know (or really, really strongly suspect) two things: 1) June 19 likely was not the first time Bias had used cocaine and 2) Dozens of players drafted in the mid-'80s had problems with cocaine, with several being suspended or kicked out of the league for cocaine use, including some potential stars. So is it equally reasonable to imagine a counterfactual in which Bias' career is similarly undone (or at least fails to live up to its fullest potential) by the league's pervasive drug culture of the time? Especially given that Bias' death itself was one of the major wake-up calls against the drug culture in sports, the event that told leagues, teams, players, and fans in a more explicit and dramatic way that cocaine was something to worry about.

Update: Here is the Salon piece that Joseph mentions in his Comment; it is an interview with Eric Sterling, who was counsel to the House committee that drafted the 1986 drug law and now is president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. The irony of the legislation that was produced is that, we now know, Bias was using powder, not crack, the night he did.