Howard Bryant and Steroid Hysteria at Its Finest

Steroid hysteria is presented at its finest in ESPN Columnist Howard Bryant’s book on the anabolic steroids in baseball scandal entitled “Juicing the Game.” Howard Bryant is an extremely talented writer with an unparalleled understanding and knowledge of the history of major league baseball. Unfortunately, his outstanding expertise in baseball history is countered by a surprisingly uninformed understanding of anabolic steroids. Bryant even glorifies Rep. Henry Waxman as a hero of the steroids in baseball era even though Waxman is completely ignorant when it comes to steroids.

Howard Bryant’s attempt to weave a narrative out of his passion for baseball and the obviously foreign world of steroids could have benefitted from considerable more steroid research. But only an exceptional writer like Howard Bryant could create such masterfully written steroid hysteria with such disturbingly false information as follows.

Despite the disagreement, virtually all doctors, Crusaders or not, could agree that anabolic steroids were lethal to the human system. They were certain that some of the more powerful steroids, such as Deca-durabolin, Winstrol, and stanozolol, were major threats to the heart, the liver, and the kidneys. Deca-durabolin, for example, was a particularly nasty steroid that had been in use among weightlifters since the 1960s. Users of the powerful yet lethal drug were highly susceptible to kidney malfunction and liver and pituitary tumors. To Robert Cantu, the noted Boston neurosurgeon who specialized in catastrophic sports injury, athletes were involved in a high-stakes poker game, in which the odds were against them and the risks were chilling. While most people knew that steroids could cause sterility, Cantu believed it to be less known that the drugs could affect the reproductive systems of a user’s children and grandchildren. That athletes were now willing to risk the future health of their unborn children for a big payday raised the stakes even further. (emphasis added)

Anabolic steroids are deadly? Deca Durabolin and Winstrol are the more powerful and dangerous steroids? Deca Durabolin causes lethal kidney problems and liver and brain cancer? Steroids cause birth defects in children AND grandchildren of athletes? That’s a lot of false information to pack into a paragraph. At least, it was eloquent bullshit.

Only a few years ago, doctors against steroids would exercise some restraint in the degree of overstated, exaggerated and false side effects they tried to pass over as fact.

Bill Roberts, an expert in the field of anabolic pharmacology, addressed the potential for harmful effects on the fetus when the father used anabolic steroids noting that even doctors most opposed to steroids would be foolish to suggest such a connection.

“Absolutely not. No conceivable mechanism, and even among those doctors, etc. most opposed to anabolic steroids, no one has argued that this may be an adverse effect.

“Androgens have no adverse effect on DNA replication so there’s no problem there. There’s also no problem of carrying androgen into the egg… the mass of the sperm cell is negligible relative to the egg. Also no sexual differentiation occurs for quite some time and so even if androgen levels in the egg were changed (which they would not detectably be) the excess androgen would diffuse out in only a matter of hours at most, whereas it is probably weeks before the first sexual differentiation occurs.

Anyway, theory aside, it’s not observed to be a problem nor believed to be one by doctors.”

Steroid demonization has reached the point in contemporary society where anti-steroid crusaders feel the public will believe the even the most ridiculous anti-steroid propaganda.

About the author

Millard

MESO-Rx | Website

Millard writes about anabolic steroids and performance enhancing drugs and their use and impact in sport and society. He discusses the medical and non-medical uses of anabolic-androgenic steroids while advocating a harm reduction approach to steroid education.