So I agreed to help Radley out during his hiatus. Then I noticed he wasn’t actually gone, so I took it easy for a couple of days. (Actually, I was working like hell at my day job, which was also my night job this week if you get my drift.) And while I was goldbricking the latest developments in the steroid controversy exploded.

I don’t know how I feel about the issue of sports and steroids. On certain levels, it’s simple: various official bodies who set the standards of competition for their sport have at various times said No, you can’t use X. That means an athlete who uses X is cheating, period. Step back one level, to the question Should sports outlaw steroids and I’m less certain of my beliefs. To me it comes down to a very practical question: how dangerous are they, really? If they really are dangerous - high likelihood of adverse health outcomes; decent chance of drug-induced sociopathology - then it’s very important, I think, for sports to outlaw them and enforce bans zealously. If steroids really work, and they’re really dangerous, then any player using steroids within a sport generates pressure on all the athletes in that sport to use them. To the extent that steroids are as effective and as dangerous as the conventional wisdom suggests, it’s far more important for governing bodies to crack down on steroid use than on recreational drugs. Leaving aside the injustice of drug prohibition in the first place, recreational drug use by athletes is self-punishing: do too much of something that’s as bad as They Say and you’ll play yourself right out of a job.

As it happens, people have attacked the conventional wisdom about steroids from both sides, some claiming that steroids are not nearly as effective as claimed; others that most of the dangers come from - and stop me if this sounds familiar - the very fact that steroid use is necessarily illicit.

Me, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure steroids can be effective when combined with talent and hard work. (Steroids basically allow more hard work than you could otherwise undertake.) I’m not qualified to judge the risks. Problem is, it sounds like our drug regime is screwed up enough to keep anyone from being qualified from judging the risks. Take this quote from an “ethicist” that Sally Jenkins interviews for her Post column today:

To this day we don’t know a great deal about the side effects of steroids. “For one thing, it would be immoral to conduct a well-controlled study where you administer steroids,” says Murray. “So that it makes it tough to get reliable info.”

Don’t take this wrong, but, huh? We don’t know for sure how bad they are; we know they offer some benefit; it’s a fact that steroid use is not an automatic death sentence; but it would be “immoral” to conduct a well-controlled study into the benefits and risks? That’s nuts. Maybe anablic steroids could really help certain classes of people. The aging? ALS sufferers? Muscular dystrophy patients? And we can’t test? This is as bad as the fact that we’re not allowed to look for beneficial uses for marijuana.

More later, but meantime, see Andrew Olmsted on John McCain butting in where he’s neither wanted nor needed. Back at the Post, Thomas Boswell expresses the outrage of the baseball purist, whom he calls “we”; Michael Wilbon is surprised to find that not all of his correspondents fit into Boswell’s we; and Jenkins, explains why that is. So far as I know, the three columns were not planned as a conscious trialectic, but it worked out that way.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 4th, 2004 at 9:59 pm by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.