As Mark McGwire comes clean and the mutton-headed mainstream media allows Jose Canseco to take shots at him, my Grassroots News publisher Arnold Asham asked the following rhetorical questions (this is a re-working of a Scott Taylor column that was published in Grassroots News in 2008).
“What’s wrong with professional athletes using steroids? And who cares if they do?”
The questions are brilliant in their simplicity and I must admit, I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to come up with an honest, moral and ethical argument against either query.
Let’s start with Question 2: “Who cares if they do?” Evidently nobody. Recently, you couldn’t buy a decent Detroit Tigers ticket (for Grapefruit League or the regular-season schedule) even though four Tigers’ stars at the time, Gary Sheffield, Carlos Guillen, Magglio Ordonez and Ivan Rodriguez, had been linked to steroid use.
Now, on to Question 1: “What’s wrong with professional athletes using steroids?” Well, let me tell you, I’ve heard all the arguments:
“Steroids are bad for you.”
“Using performance enhancing drugs is cheating.”
“It’s not a level playing field if you use steroids.”
OK, but why? No one, not even the king of drug cops, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s former chair Dick Pound has ever been able to answer that question. Pound and his followers have created the bad rap, but they’ve never once given a clear indication as to why steroids are bad.
In November of 2005 in the publication “Virtual Mentor,” the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, Dr. Norman Fost, director of the Program in Medical Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, wrote an article entitled “Steroid Hysteria: Unpacking the Claims.”
He answered the questions Pound and the mainstream media horde have never answered. Although, I would doubt neither Pound nor the mainstream media would have appreciated or agreed with his answers.
“The long campaign to demonize and prohibit the use of anabolic steroids in sports—in the press, by the United States Congress, and by the offices of the leaders of sports—has been so strident and one-sided that a literate person would have little reason to suspect there is another side to the story,” Dr. Fost wrote. “But it is the business of ethics to present justifications for actions, and the claims that have been made for prohibiting the use of anabolic steroids by competent adults appear to be incoherent, disingenuous, hypocritical, and based on bad facts.”
The worst excuse is the one that suggests that because of steroids, the playing field is not level and competition is unfair. That would be true if performance-enhancing drugs were not easily available and if big league athletes didn’t make enough money to pay for them. And these are the same big league athletes who often take “legal” cortisone shots or naproxen sodium pills in order to play while injured. These are the people who eat legal painkillers “like M & Ms” and make regular use of the legal muscle-building supplement, Creatine.
According to Fost, “Competition can be unfair if there is unequal access to such enhancements, but equal access can be achieved more predictably by deregulation than by prohibition. It is hypocritical for leaders in Major League Baseball to trumpet their concern about fair competition in a league that allows one team (the Yankees) to have a payroll three times larger than most of its competitors.”
For years, we’ve heard the argument that taking steroids causes acne on the back, a large, square forehead, loss of hair, shrinking of testicles and, eventually, an early death. As an ethicist, those claims confuse Fost.
“Good ethics starts with good facts, and the claims on this point are, to understate the case, seriously overstated,” he wrote. “Articles abound in the mass media on the life-threatening risks of anabolic steroids: cancer, heart disease, stroke, and so on. What is missing are peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals to support the claims.”
Fost loves to site the case of former Oakland Raiders linebacker Lyle Alzado. According to Fost: “So Lyle Alzado, the NFL all-star, is presented on the front page of the New York Times and the cover of Sports Illustrated because of an alleged steroid-related brain tumor. What is missing is a single article, or evidence, or even a quote from any authority on the topic to support any connection between steroids and Alzado’s tumor.”
Another argument that makes Fost laugh in disgust is the one that suggests anabolics are unnatural and “undermine the essence of sport.”
“This claim seems predicated on the notion that there is some essence of sport. Oh, spare me,” Fost says. “Sports are games, invented by humans, with arbitrary rules that are constantly changing. Since the beginning of recorded history, athletes have used an infinite variety of unnatural assists to enhance performance, from springy shoes to greasy swimsuits, bamboo poles to better bats, and endless chemicals from carb-filled diets to Gatorade drinks. Why is there not a ban on training in high altitudes, or sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, for the purpose of raising hemoglobin to unnatural levels?”
Here’s another one that gives our University of Wisconsin ethicist indigestion: “Steroids undermine the integrity of sports records.”
“Of all the proposed punishments for Rafael Palmeiro, the Baltimore Orioles slugger who was reported to have tested positive for steroids, the favorite seemed to be to abolish his home run records,” Fost recalled. “The implicit concern is that Babe Ruth or Roger Maris is being unfairly deprived of his place in history. But steroids are only one of many reasons why the old records keep falling. The fences are shorter, the pitching mound is lower, the ball is livelier, the strike zone keeps changing, and so on. The left field fence in Jacobs Field is more than 100 feet closer than it was in Municipal Stadium when it opened in the 1930s, so let’s have some asterisks for home runs at The Jake and every other stadium with shortened fences.”
Everyone will agree that kids shouldn’t use steroids. Kids shouldn’t use any drugs at all, frankly.
And don’t forget, scientific study provides clear proof that beverage alcohol is much worse for you – athlete or non-athlete – than steroids will ever be. Just ask former NHL all-star defenceman Rob Ramage who has gone to jail for four years because he drank too much and drove his car.
Strange but hypocritically true: Beverage alcohol is not only legal, our provincial government advertises it and encourages its use.
We live in a drug-centric society. All you have to do is watch the nightly news shows in the United States and you will see one drug advertisement after another. There is now a drug to get it up, take it down, wake up in the morning, go to sleep at night. There are drugs for acid reflux (burping), for restless leg syndrome (whatever) and too much cholesterol (change your diet). Our society now exists on drugs.
But as Dr. Fost maintains, the media has decided that the use of anabolic steroids in sport should be illegal. Trouble is, no one has made it very clear as to why. How is it that beverage alcohol and prescription painkillers are “good” for us, but muscle-building designer drugs are not?
Personally, I don’t doubt steroids should be outlawed in sport. I’m not sure our publisher, Mr. Asham, would argue that steroids should be outlawed. It’s just that we’d both like someone to give us a good reason why.