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| Yes | 38% | 56 votes | Total: 147 votes | |
| No | 62% | 91 votes |
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Add to FavoritesIn the wake of the Mitchell report, talking heads swamped us with stories about performance enhancing drugs in baseball, but this recent headline from the LA Times didn't get much notice: "Drugs to build up that mental muscle. Academics, musicians, even poker champs use pills to sharpen their minds, legally. Labs race to develop even more." According to the article, corporate executives and students take these drugs to enhance their natural abilities. A memory enhancement pill is right around the corner.
What person who uses their brain in their profession wouldn't take a memory pill that was developed and tested for safety then marketed by a reputable pharmaceutical company?
Personal success is the motivation that drove Americans to build the greatest country the world has ever known, and to be successful, we have to outperform our competition. One of America's traditional strengths is the ease with which we adapt new technologies to our advantage. From the local gymnasium to web-based education, Americans develop technology to improve individual performance, then we embrace that technology, become more competitive and more successful, and move on to develop new technologies to continue the process.
When the memory pill goes on sale, CEOs and scientists, doctors and lawyers, and politicians and pundits will line up like children to sit on Santa's lap. But if baseball players take steroids, we publicly flog them and threaten to take away their accomplishments.
The Mitchell report confirmed what we knew all along. Pretty much everybody in baseball, like all professional sports, is using steroids. Because they're banned, it's cheating. I'm happy to see media darling Roger Clemens knocked off his pedestal. Any intellectually honest observer realized long ago he was juicing just like media whipping boy Barry Bonds.
Now that this controversy is out in the open, we can debate the real issue we should have debated originally: should steroids be banned. The only difference between mental enhancement drugs and steroids is that steroids are illegal. The only reason these players are cheaters and the talking heads are wringing their hands is steroids are illegal. Why?
Common knowledge says steroids are dangerous, but that's only because they're illegal. It's circular logic. If steroids were legal, the pharmaceutical giants would make them safe, effective, and immensely profitable faster than the FDA could fill out the paperwork. And how dangerous are steroids really? Baseball players take plenty of steroids and remain healthy. Doctors prescribe steroids to help heal injuries. Too much steak clogs our arteries, shortens our lives, and can lead to heart attacks, but we take cholesterol pills to fix that.
Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig and scores of sportswriters tell us that steroids are banned to protect "the integrity of the game" which is about fair play, but legal steroids wouldn't affect the integrity of the game.
During Baseball's storied history, teams have raised and lowered the mound, cut their grass short or long, shaved the grass on the lines to push bunts fair or foul. Teams steal each others' signs, try to manipulate the umpires, and find every way they can to gain an edge to win. All this is condoned because both teams play on that same field in a fair competition.
In contrast, Baseball's biggest concern is gambling, because gambling can lead to players throwing games. In that case, the conditions on the field aren't the same for both teams. By banning steroids, Baseball has created the unfair competition on the field it most fears - some players have improved their performance with steroids and others have not. The only way for Baseball to restore fair play and therefore to restore the integrity of the game is to legalize steroids.
But when Bud Selig and the sports pundits talk about the integrity of the game, they're really talking about the integrity of records. These talking heads think of Baseball as a Norman Rockwell painting or a snow globe that captures their romanticized snapshot of the game. That's a fantasy. Players play in different home ballparks, which are shrinking almost as fast as our freedoms. Ballparks, divisional competition, line-ups, training techniques and nutrition already affect the integrity of the records. Singling out steroids is disingenuous. They might as well ban playing in Colorado's thin air. The record books and Hall of Fame should simply document the many changes in the game, including steroids.
Performance enhancing drugs aren't going away. Steroids powered the home run race between McGuire and Sosa that brought fans back to the game. Home runs keep fans buying tickets. It's human nature for the players to want to be the best they can be. Baseball wants to make the most money it can. So because steroids are illegal, we're stuck with duplicitous Baseball sanctimoniously decrying steroids in public while looking the other way in private. The back alley chemists and Baseball testers compete in a perpetual arms race. We're teaching our children to search out steroids on the black market and take them without supervision. This steroid ban hurts kids and undermines society and the rule of law.
When Baseball executives, managers and sportswriters start popping memory pills, will they laugh at their own hypocrisy? Baseball is trying to teach us another important lesson about life freedom is always the right answer. We should apply that lesson to every social problem. Steroids should be legal for the benefit of individuals and society.
Learn more about this author, Mark Luedtke.
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No
Back in the sixties, revelations of amphetamine use in athletic competitions around the globe brought to the public attention the prevalence of stimulants in sport. One sport, battered by the skepticism of a public toward the source of the revelation and without a defining turning point or rallying cry, did nothing to remedy its drug problems for another thirty years. The other sport, left with a couple of corpses, took a larger public-relations hit but began implementing nascent programs which have evolved over the decades into stringent testing programs today.
Cycling has long been regarded as a "dirty" sport on this side of the pond. The 1960 Rome Olympics saw Danish cyclist Knud Jensen fatally collapse on his quest for gold. Seven years later, British champion Tom Simpson tumbled on the side of the road up Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France. Despite the protests of the riders - five-time Tour champion Jacques Anquetil famously quipped against drug testing, "We cannot race on mineral water alone..." - the governing bodies of the sport began testing riders for synthetic pharmaceuticals which could lead to another tragic fatality.
Baseball, the national pastime of the rising superpower on the "New" continent, denounced that there could possibly be a problem with amphetamines in clubhouses across the country. Even after pitcher Jim Bouton released his 1970 memoir Ball Four, which revealed rampant use of "greenies" during the course of his final season in Major League Baseball, the information was lightly regarded by the powers that be. No substantive agreement to test for amphetamines, with penalties, came about until 2004... thirty-four years after the casual sports fan started hearing references to amphetamines in the sports pages.
The highly-anticipated Mitchell Report is expected to come out any day now. Baseball may never be the same... or this could turn out to be just another hundred or so pages of ineffective bluster. Study groups seem to have become all the rage lately. Have a problem? Start a study group. What was once confined to small rooms in campus libraries is now the domain of all of America's most crucial issues. But for all the documentation and critical thought produced by these high-powered brainstorm sessions, few real results ever seem to come out of them. George W. Bush was able to effectively shrug off the work of his father's confidant and Secretary of State, James Baker, and continue to plot his own course on the disaster that has become Iraq. Appointing a study group, alas, has become mere window dressing to placate a public on the brink of mutiny...
History lends credence to the hypothesis that the Mitchell Report will neither bring about a way forward from the taint of a steroid-plumped past nor a new approach to be implemented by Major League Baseball. As ESPN.com stated in a report today about the impending release of findings, too many people interviewed by the investigatory commission led by former Maine Senator George Mitchell felt as if they were required to "guess" which players might or might not be using performance-enhancin g drugs. The AP has stated that the report will not address amphetamines, long a popular means of remaining alert for games among professional ballplayers, merely the muscle-producing family of synthetic steroids. The scope of the commission has been narrowed too finitely in delving to the root of baseball's problems.
In nineteen months, the commission interviewed hundreds of MLB personnel, from clubhouse assistants to general managers to players and scouts... one shouldn't be surprised if a peanut vendor or two was polled for opinions. But only two active baseball players - Jason Giambi and an as-yet-unnamed player - were interviewed by the study group.
Remember, Mitchell had no subpoena power. Any gains made by his study group in its quest for answers into the suspected prevalence of performance enhancement in baseball were made voluntarily by those interviewed. Only threats of disciplinary action by Bud Selig could compel any player to appear before Mitchell and his crew; Giambi first admitted his steroid use to USA Today, two months before he was "compelled" to speak with the Senator. Essentially, Mitchell has compiled a report on steroid use by Major League Baseball players with next to no interaction with the people who would stand to lose the most from the release of the study group's findings.
Each side in question has its interests in the matter - Mitchell himself is director of the Boston Red Sox. Players naturally deplore and abhor and generally are striving to avoid at all costs losing their earning power with the revelation of any damning information. The owners, led by commissioner Bud Selig, would be content to sweep this issue under the rug... just as they did with Bouton's book and the tacit acceptance of amphetamines. No sport will ever be completely immune from scandal, but mere name-dropping will do little to bring about any redirection toward either more stringent testing protocol or more public transparency of the process. The odds are substantially stacked against this study group finding any substantive solutions for the steroid situation...
If it is truly motivated to bring sanctity back to its sport, Major League Baseball could take a lesson from professional cycling. Despite the perceived damage that decades of public release of detected dopers have wrought on the sport, cycling still attracts large followings worldwide. The Scotsman reported on 27 July 2007 that 15 million people lined the route of the 2007 race to cheer on the blur of spandex passing by at thirty-five miles an hour; another TWO-BILLION viewed the event worldwide on television. The sport continues to seek ways to root out the cheats in an effort to preserve some semblance of sanctity in its statistics...
But if baseball is intent on merely making money - and it is doing that quite nicely - it would do well to merely ride the status quo. Selig announced yesterday that baseball generated a record $6 billion in revenue during the 2007 season, so obviously fan interest is not waning. Fan interest was reignited after the 1994 strike by the fiery assault of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire on Roger Maris' single-season home run record... and so too was the arms race that became the "arms" race as athletes sought every advantage - artificial and natural, anabolic and anaerobic. Mitchell can point the horse that has become baseball down one of many paths, but he cannot make it walk down that route...
Learn more about this author, Zach Bigalke.
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