During the last couple of years, steroids have once again made a big splash in the oldest of professional sports: Baseball. Each day, some new revelation, opinion, rumor or media storm transpires to include more players, deem steroids as serious threat to long standing records and to the human body, and most often mentioned, children and teenage usage.
In a recent interview of Dennis Kurcinich, the U.S. senator stated, "it is important to show that steroids cannot get you ahead…and teaching children that steroids are bad."
First, steroids are not "bad." Abuse of them through overdosing, improper usage and lack of proper medical prescription and guidance is the real terrorizing factor, not the drugs themselves. For those athletes that took them in the 1970’s, 80’s and early 90’s without medical supervision, inadequate personal knowledge and 2nd rate resources, steroids did indeed have tragic results in these athletes, namely boxers, football players and track athletes, among others. Like anything else considered taboo, illegal and performance-enhancing against the rules, written and/or unwritten, people shied away from advertising their usage, even to their personal doctors, going against proper medical advice or getting no advice at all. And this behavior will have a great effect on a person's life.
To say steroids do not help, as the senator said in misspeaking about the ramifications and/or results, he needs to look first at the immediate results: Ken Caminiti, NL MVP; Barry Bonds, multiple-MVP with usage (according to grand jury testimony leaked illegally); Mark McGuire, HR record holder; Jason Giambi, AL MVP; Ben Johnson, fastest man in the world (for a time); Jose Canseco, HR hitter; and many others that were transformed into better ball players, becoming faster, stronger, etc. The caveat is to utilize them correctly; and to know how to reduce usage appropriately, while playing and after retiring from the sport.
My viewpoint is this: the ‘real’ business of athletics is to obtain or reach the highest levels of performance through any means available, sometimes unscrupulously from a media/legal perspective, with the substantial rewards (the money and fame) to follow.
And many GMs and owners, such as San Diego’s GM Kevin Towers, have understood that this is a player’s primary motivator. Owners have turned a blind eye for years to continue to attract record numbers to the park, the arena, the stadium and to pad their bottom lines, unscrupulously too. (The media played its part too in lack of focus on this issue for many a year.)
Professional and collegiate sports have grown into multi-billion dollar industries which promote vigorously the business aspects of sport over the dying respect of the long-begotten days of youthful excitement of just playing the game 'for the game'.
And with this, persons that participate at an expert level, the game is no longer just fun, but a lifestyle, a career and an end-all-be-all, to some players. With all the technology and desire to do it, would it not be better to monitor all athletes, knowing they are using, but to keep the steroids at reasonable levels with doctor’s analysis?
Many experts (doctors, not users) have stated that these chemicals can be safe and effective with proper management, dosages and prescription. At least this would protect athletes, give a real safeguard and possibly open dialogue to clean up voluntarily, without accusations and asterisks attached a baseball stat.
Norm Fost, pediatrics professor and medical-ethics expert at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, is confounded by the paroxysms over steroids in sports. "There's mass hysteria because of sheer misinformation,'' he says.
He has been studying and writing about steroids in sports for more than 20 years. He has yet to find research that conclusively attributes a single death to steroid use. Former Raiders player Lyle Alzado believed steroids caused the brain tumor that eventually killed him, but there is no medical evidence to back up his claim -- or any claim that steroid use causes cancer.
In truth, a football player is more likely to suffer permanent disability by simply playing the game than by taking steroids. There is more risk in taking painkillers and cortisone shots to play while injured -- a common practice in football -- than in using steroids. Yet we allow adults to decide for themselves whether to throw their bodies in front of charging 350- pound linemen or pop pills to hurry back out on the field. Why are we so paternalistic about steroids?
Do I personally like the fact they are using steroids to bump up HRs in baseball?
No, I like aspects of the game long lost in the barrage of HRs, like stealing, hit-and-running and bunting. But to smear, deride, chide or prosecute anyone about their usage, past, present or undoubtedly in the future, we must first comprehend that every drug, or invention, or action or idea that changes the playing field of life, or specifically, baseball, is generally preceded with intense objection, and is soon followed by the parsing together of new legalese to the detriment of a selected few.
Since the ratification of the Constitution for the United States and each of its properly ratified amendments, there have been numerous acts by officials, including statutes, regulations, executive orders, court rulings, and ordinary decisions and actions taken while on duty and under color of law, which have been unconstitutional, and in many cases, in violation of civil rights of persons and of constitutional laws.
Have we ever stopped long enough to learn exactly what the long-lasting effects are, or what (if any) controls can exist? Or how we can change the usage, procedures or maintenance of any situation involving drugs (or other possibly useful ideas), without criminality introduced into the foray? Why don't we prosecute or hinder the usage of pharmaceuticals that are currently linked to tragic suicides in teenagers? Because their lobbyists are well connected and the supposed benefits outweighs the perceived risks? Why do we allow ANY drugs and alcohol to be used? (21st Amendment)
We talk of an open society, a tolerant society, but it does not truly exist. In fact, more everyday, America becomes dead set against anyone trying to succeed or changing himself or herself, outside the perceived norm. Some ways are harmful, but it is not solely due to the drugs, or techniques or the direct personal reactions to them. Some of it is driven by a freedom-restricting, quasi-pious society afraid to properly address (or cope) with the spectrum of human behavior which is driven by instinctual, psychologically motivating and by peer pressure-related factors. Accountability for steroids is mutual; and no one wants to address that, because it lessens the societal impact of the perceived wrong or future punishment to be meted out for the objectionable action.
Furthermore, and of greater and reverberant consequence, we Americans tend to see ourselves as policing the world for it’s own good, usually at the expense of a sovereign nation’s resources and cultural norms. The inherent guise of this is to forcefully say: " We know better. Our knowledge tells us your wrong. Our way is better, and you will agree, or we will make you."
Steroids falls into this much larger category of hot button issues (gay marriage, personal privacy, social welfare, WMD, Iraqi War, etc.) that are under the large umbrella of Power and Control Techniques of an individual, or group or another society. U.S. lawmakers are interested in making laws on everything and everyone. Our leaders in this country are not really interested in stopping steroids, but in criminal prosecutions, and adding one more group of people, or actions, to the litany of no-no’s in life.
Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
— Frederick Douglass, civil rights activist, Aug. 4, 1857
I realize it is currently illegal to use certain steroids, in more than just sports, but it is more about telling us that it is one more thing that can’t be used, even if it can be effective, with proper medical guidance, yet we allow numerous pharmaceuticals to pervade our society with only the FDA as a puppet controlled by the monetary interests of big business. (With emphasis I say this.)
This is just my opinion, but I invite you to disagree.
