This is the best and most convincing argument that I’ve ever seen as to why “we should accept performance-enhancing drugs in competitive sports.” Those advocating the position that anabolic steroids, growth hormone, etc. should be permitted in sports were:
- Radley Balko – senior editor and investigative journalist for Reason magazine,
- Norman Fost, M.D., M.P.H. – professor of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, and director of the Bioethics Program which he founded in 1973;
- Julian Savulescu – Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and of the Program on Ethics and Biosciences in the James Martin 21st Century School.
I highly recommend that you download and read the transcript of the entire debate. Here are some excerpts with compelling arguments from Norm Fost why we should change the “rules of the game” to permit anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances:
1. Steroids Give an Unfair Advantage to Athletes
…advantages are only unfair if they’re unequally distributed. The usual solution is to expand access. When Bob Seagren showed up at the ’72 Olympics in-, with a fiberglass pole, it was not banned, but, a-, uh, there was a time to allow others to practice with it, and it was incorporated. When Kenyan runners were found to enhance their performance by raising their hemoglobin by training at altitude, the reaction was not to ban abnormally high hemoglobins, or to prohibit others from training at altitude, but to encourage everyone to do it.
2. Steroids are Harmful to Athletes
Two, critics say these drugs are harmful, but they rely on information that’s wiley-, wildly exaggerated or just fabricated. We are told repeatedly that these drugs use heart disease, cancer, and stroke, while human growth hormone has been given to almost a million children for fifty years, and there’s still no real serious side effects that have been discovered… I ask you in the audience to quickly name, in your own minds, a single elite athlete who’s had a stroke or a heart attack while playing sports… But sport itself is far more dangerous, and we don’t prohibit it. The number of deaths from playing professional football and college football are fifty to a hundred times higher than even the wild exaggerations about steroids. More people have died playing baseball than have died of steroid use.
3. Athletes are Coerced into Using Steroids
Three critics say that allowing their use is coercive, that you’re forced to use them… Coercion is the use or threat of force that’s never occurred in this country to the best of my knowledge. There is no entitlement to play professional sports; it’s a privilege requiring an enormous sacrifice and taking on enormous risks, with or without steroids. Many walk away from it and choose not to do it, and no one is forced to take it on.
4. Steroids Undermine Fan Interest
Four, critics claim that steroids undermine fan interest, and this is simply empirically false, baseball attendance has ridden steadily in the steroid era, professional football is even more popular, and Barry Bonds, widely assumed to be a steroid user, is the biggest draw in sports, adding ten thousand fannies in the seats everywhere he goes. Chicks love the long ball, guys love the long ball, they don’t care what they’re using.
5. Steroids Undermine Integrity of Records
This is naïve, the records are not comparable with or without steroids or growth hormone. Baseball fences are shorter, the mound is lower, the ball is livelier, and Coors Field is a mile above sea level. By one estimate, Babe Ruth playing in today’s ball parks would hit a thousand home runs, not the mere seven hundred and fifty that Hank Aaron and Bonds have hit. The only valid comparison is with peers playing in the same arenas with the same equipment against the same opponents, and Ruth hit more home runs in one season than any other team. He is in a league of his own, and no one has come close.
6. Steroid Use by Athletes Bad for Children
Finally, critics claim that steroids present bad role modeling for children – Everyone agrees these drugs should be banned for children. The adverse effects are different, they stunt growth, they are not competent to make informed choices. I support testing in schools, not to punish the kids, but to catch the peddlers. Anyone caught selling drugs to children should be hung, followed by a fair trial. In closing, when you go out to dinner tonight, enjoy the wine that relaxes you, or start your day tomorrow with a double mocha latte that gets you going, but please be less critical of others who, like you, try to enhance their performance in a variety of ways. Thank you.
http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/TranscriptContainer/PerformanceEnhancingDrugs%20011508.pdf
About the author
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.
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