Posted on 12/07/2004 8:27:12 AM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
SO athletes use steroids to perform better. Wall Street traders take Ritalin and everyone uses caffeinated drinks during work to stay alert. News anchors get face lifts and actors take Botox so more people watch them. What's different about athletes?
Yet, this weekend you would have thought that Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds had committed some unspeakable crime. Commentators spoke of them "falsifying the product." Saturday, Sen. John McCain promised hearings and threatened legislation imposing drug-testing standards if professional baseball does not crack down. By Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist made a similar call for legislation, and McCain said President Bush would sign such a bill.
Athletes may have more at stake than most of the rest of us. They may go a little farther in competing, but the risks seem pretty mild. This spring a baseball players' union representative, Gene Orza, claimed that steroids are "not worse than cigarettes." With over 4,000 people playing major league baseball over the last decade and claims that 40 or 50 percent of players are using some form of anabolic steroids, what is striking is how rare baseball deaths are and that these are not really related to "performance-enhancing" drugs. Take the last two years:
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Do you have any evidence to suggest that the grand jury testimony was leaked by the prosecutors?
When they start keeping records for Wall Street geeks and network talking heads, then caffeine and face lifts will matter.
What about the children who try to emulate professional athletes? That is what I'd consider the most important reason to ban the use of steroids. If children know that professional athletes can use steroids to enhance their abilities, children will obtain these steroids to enhance their performance. They do it now, if the use of steroids by professional athletes is not stopped, then their use by children will dramatically increase.
The damage done to adults can be severe. The damage done to children could be catastrophic. Do we really want children with superior physcial abilites who die in their teens or early twenties from the use of steroids, or any other banned or illegal substance?
excellent
Hillary! is that you ?
Paging Senator McCain. . . .
besides their testicles shrinking to the size of raisens.....nothing i guess
Not if a responsible media pointed out that using anabolics at a premature ages, forces the growth plates to close early, stunting your growth... (odd how that most salient point is constantly missed in the reporting on this issue, isn't it?)
and what was wrong with creative people being on drugs...
The big problem is that college kids will have to take steroids to make it to the big league and then high school kids will have to take steroids to get a college to notice them.
I agree. I think using performance-enhancing drugs, to the detriment of long-term health, shows a commitment to the sport rarely seen these days. These guys are, literally, sacrificing their bodies to be the best they can be. What's so wrong about that? If the other athletes don't have the guts to "man" up, to do whatever it takes to win, I don't see how they can cry "not fair." The same steroids are available to them, as much as they want, whenever they want. I say legalize them all down to the high school level, and let's sit back and enjoy these amazing feats of sport, performed at levels only dreamed of fifty years ago.
PLAY BALL!
A silly and ignorant example. Even Triple H wouldn't take a completely unlimited amount of drugs to realize his full "potential", as doing so would likely kill him very quickly. He probably doesn't want his testicles to shrink to the size of raisins in a few years either (assuming that he lived long enough to see that particular physical effect).
But I do not believe that a fictional hungry athlete who wanted to quickly mainline a world record into his veins would have the same scruples. With enough performance-enhancing drugs and a modicum of physical tools, I stand by my statement that any reasonably-trained athlete could shatter any world record in existence.
ATLANTA (CNNSI.com) -- Former major leaguer Ken Caminiti says he was on steroids when he won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1996, according to an exclusive report in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated.
But even though it left him with health problems that continue to this day, Caminiti defended his use of steroids and told SI's Tom Verducci the practice is now so rampant in baseball that he would not discourage others from doing the same. Caminiti told Verducci that he continued to use steroids for the rest of his career, which ended last season when he hit .228 with 15 home runs and 41 RBIs for the Texas Rangers and the Atlanta Braves.
"Look at all the money in the game," Caminiti said. "A kid got $252 million. So I can't say, 'Don't do it,' not when the guy next to you is as big as a house and he's going to take your job and make the money."
Snip,
Steroids are illegal in the United States unless prescribed by a doctor for a known medical condition. But they are easily obtained, most commonly over the counter at pharmacies in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Former major leaguer Chad Curtis, who retired after last season, estimated that 40 to 50 percent of major league ballplayers use steroids -- sometimes supplemented with joint-strengthening human growth hormone -- to suddenly become stronger and faster.
"You see guys whose facial features, jaw bones and cheek bones change past [age] 30. Do they think that happens naturally?" Curtis told SI. "You go, 'What happened to that guy?' Then you'll hear him say he worked out over the winter and put on 15 pounds of muscle. I'm sorry, working out is not going to change your facial features."
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/special_report/steroids/
Preliminary reports say that Ken Caminiti died of a massive drug overdose. You can blame that on his addictions, you can blame that on human frailty, and you can blame that on the Players Union.
Yes, it’s true that Ken Caminiti retired in 2001 and that he had not been under the umbrella of the Union for many years, but it was the Union that let a former MVP reach this stage in his life and they have let far too many player get into harms way. It has been a part of the Union culture for too long – shielding the players from any meaningful drug testing, from crack to steroids. The policy has been to try to shelter players from ownership and ownership control and meddling, but in that attempt they’ve blinded themselves to the harm they were doing to their own membership.
The Union has had other drug addictions laid at their door – remember Steve Howe, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Vida Blue, and Ferguson Jenkins - to name a few of the more prominent ones, but this is the first time that a recently retired Major Leaguer has died of an overdose. There has been rehab, jail time, and treatment for some players and former players but virtually every single time drug use has been an issue the Union has attempted to hide and protect the offenders rather than seeing them suspended and getting proper treatment.
Most of us recognize that drug addiction is a disease, but not all drug use is addiction. The MLBPA (the Major League Baseball Players Association - aka the Union) recognizes that and believes that the majority of drug use in the game is either recreational or for personal enhancement. Because of that they have opposed drug testing based upon the right to privacy and the fact that MLB players are not in a position to endanger others through their drug use.
http://www.athomeplate.com/caminiti.shtml
He cheated the sport and he cheated in life and now he's dead.
About as much evidence as anyone has that some of these players were using steroids. The leaks are clearly coming from the prosecutors' offices, and there is a legal strategy behind what's specifically leaked and the timing of the individual leaks. If it's not the prosecutors themselves, it's their underlings. Baseball is dirty, but so is the BALCO investigation.
Steroids allow you to get better results with little effort. There is nothing admirable in it. It's the same as improving golf or tennis results simply by using better equipment, and is in contrast to athletes who do better because of better training regimens and diets, which require discipline and effort.
Thinking about it in an economic model John Lott might appreciate, steroids dilute the ability of athletes to signal effort, because you can obtain good results with less work (or less skill, for that matter). In some fundamental sense what we are paying to see are skill and effort. Steroids thus dilute the value of competition.
"WHAT'S WRONG WITH PLAYERS ON STEROIDS?"
Think about it. If steroids were legal, any athlete who participated in proffesional sports would have no choice but to take steroids in order to stay competitive. Any player not on steroids would be so substandard in their performance they would be unplayable. Thus, proffesional sports would eventually become a freak show featuring impotent, deformed and mindless freaks who's only purpose on earth is to play for the entertainment of normal humans.
This is an important question. What will the verdict be if he continues as he has for another year or two, while frequently testing clean?
BUT, if Major League Baseball wants me and my kids as fans, they have to clean it up.
This is exactly my position too. The MLB is a lot more scared of ratings in the toilet than regulatory fines that are a drop in the bucket. Same with the thugs in the NBA. As people stop watching, or bringing their kids to games, hopefully sports will compete to claim that fan base by cleaning it up. Amazingly, I am beginning to think about following hockey.
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