The Drug Enforcement Administration, in announcing the results of a years-long investigation into the trafficking of performance enhancing drugs, proved two things yesterday: First, someone needs to remove the Jerry Bruckheimer flicks from the DEA library (we must never hear again of anything named “Operation Raw Deal” or the like); second, government agents can be as boastfully clueless about PEDs as they are about every other sort of drug.

The DEA’s work does look impressive. Operation Raw Deal has so far resulted not only in 124 arrests, but in the seizure of 56 supposed drug labs and 11.4 million alleged “steroid dosage units.” All of this was the result of a truly astonishing feat of bureaucracy, as, according to a press release, the investigation involved at least seven federal agencies and nine foreign countries, among them Mexico, Germany, and China.

“DEA successfully attacked the illegal steroid industry at every level of its distribution network,” the DEA administrator, Karen Tandy, said in the release. She shouldn’t have said this. It’s an exceptionally silly claim to make, comparable to having claimed that by pounding on sand for hours, DEA had successfully attacked a beach.

The key country here is China. This investigation appears to have been mainly aimed at the huge market for synthetic steroids and human growth hormone that’s being supplied by Chinese companies such as Genescience Pharmaceutical Co., whose CEO was charged in Rhode Island with participating in an international drug smuggling conspiracy.

Earlier this year, I came into possession of a kit of what was purportedly Jintropin, a synthetic version of hGH manufactured by Genescience. The kit was distributed by a company that advertised with banners on bodybuilding Web sites. It was not hard to get. It came in a small box about the size of a folded tabloid, which was held shut by a supposed seal of authenticity, a sticker bearing a serial number and embedded with a series of randomly printed hash marks. The serial number and hash marks were meant to be checked on a Genescience Web site to ensure the authenticity of the product — small glass vials filled with thimblefuls of a coarse powder about the color of stale pus. This powder was meant to be mixed with water and injected; the kit, which cost $350, was about a month’s supply.

I was never able to get an English speaker on the phone at Genescience, despite CEO Lei Jin’s University of California education; but the serial number and hash marks did check out on the company’s Web site.

There is no way to know how many similar suppliers are operating in America, Mexico, and China, but the number is probably in the thousands. The very scale of Operation Raw Deal proves the point; it strains credulity to think that the investigation could have affected more than an insignificant fraction of the illegal trade in these drugs. Right now, the DEA claims to have “hundreds of thousands of names” of customers of the suppliers against whom the operation was targeted. That would strongly suggest that at least a million Americans are buying steroids and hGH online. The mere idea of trying to enforce laws against so many people who are doing something that harms no one but themselves is, depending on your point of view, at the least a logistical nightmare and at most an obscenity.

Alarmingly, the precedents set by the Signature Pharmacies and Balco cases suggest that many of the supposed hundreds of thousands of names will make their way to the public. This is a frightening, un-American idea. The mere idea that the federal government might one way or the other release the names of people who haven’t been charged with a crime to their employers or the public, violating their reasonable expectation of privacy, is disturbing, something that’s true whether they’re famous baseball players or anonymous citizens.

The result of these raids will be to make Internet-based PED commerce more secure. Secure Web sites will go up, their names passed on through encrypted e-mails sent by people logged on to the Internet from public connections through remote proxy servers. Drugs will be paid for by untraceable means like cash or anonymous gold transfers, and mailed to dummy addresses provided by places like the UPS Store. The only way around some of these measures would involve government resources more likely to be used against transnational terrorist groups than against shortstops, grandfathers looking for a way to feel a few years younger, and amateur bodybuilders.

PEDs are not going away. They are also not just a sports problem. Say the DEA has 200,000 names; that would be about six times longer than the list of every man who’s ever played Major League Baseball. The issues here are that people want these drugs, and that they are not going to stop wanting them. Because of that, the question is not about whether we’ll really get to see who was on drugs after all, it’s a question of public policy: Is this the best use of our scarce resources? Operation Raw Deal will get the DEA some headlines, something it hasn’t had in a while. It ought to also raise some questions about our priorities, and how we attack our problems.

There is a real public interest in cracking down on Internet drug sales. As lurid as the DEA’s claims about a “clandestine web of international drug dealers who lurk on the Internet for young adults” are, they’re also pretty accurate. There’s absolutely no question that potentially toxic products such as Jintropin are being sold to high school athletes. As always, though, enforcement cannot solve the problem; only education can. If anyone at the DEA thinks that their list of “hundreds of thousands of names” is going to make any 16-year-old think anything other than “That’s what happens when you’re not careful,” they’re wrong. This approach just won’t work.

tmarchman@nysun.com