Sullivan on Steroids
Andrew Sullivan, though most often brilliant, gets it wrong today.
First of all, Sullivan lumps the use of helpful drugs with the use of steroids on the premise that steroids are also obviously helpful to atheletic performance, or athletes wouldn't use them. The comparison only sounds correct because of its simplicity - steroids as a group of drugs are intensely dangerous and unpredictable in almost every case - because they tend to affect different people in different ways - and because of slight differences in formula producing dramatic changes in the effects of the drug or drug cocktail.
Second, Sullivan literally leaps over the real danger to American sports that would be caused by a open-steroid policy, something John McCain rightly pointed out. Open steroid use, with lesser and lesser oversight, would begin at lower and lower age groups of athletes. Soon college and high school athletes would begin steroid use in their early teens to ensure professional caliber strength and performance. Within 20 years, rookie year professional athletes would be uber-muscled freaks of nature, largely sterile and impotent from a decade of massive largely unregulated and amateurly administered doping of increasingly hybrid and not fully understood chemical agents.
Third, Sullivan claims: "Yes, it's unfair when some players use them and others don't. But the answer to that might just as well be universal steroid use as a universal ban. I think trying to stop this is almost certainly futile (the steroid technology almost always out-strips the testing technology) and not obviously virtuous."
Testing abilities would certainly NOT lag behind in MLB or any other league if the leagues had federal law to contend with, and the players would welcome the medical protection provided - if no one else is doing it, I don't have to. But Sullivan's whole argument is quite weak (and quite unlike him, really), as if we should take no steps to prevent a harmful activity based solely on the argument that the rates of the activity are too high. That doesn't make it okay, it makes it an emergency.
Sullivan goes on to say: The notion that there is some "pure" human being out there - unaffected by the technology that now enhances our lives in so many ways - is fiction. Why are sports the only arena in which this fiction is maintained?" To claim that steroid use is not quite well understood to be harmful, and harmful in multifaceted irrevocable ways, is the true fiction here. Open steroid use would reset the bar and turn professional sports into a biogenetics experimental lab, the athletes themselves being the lab rats, and with true athleticism becoming eliminated altogether.
First of all, Sullivan lumps the use of helpful drugs with the use of steroids on the premise that steroids are also obviously helpful to atheletic performance, or athletes wouldn't use them. The comparison only sounds correct because of its simplicity - steroids as a group of drugs are intensely dangerous and unpredictable in almost every case - because they tend to affect different people in different ways - and because of slight differences in formula producing dramatic changes in the effects of the drug or drug cocktail.
Second, Sullivan literally leaps over the real danger to American sports that would be caused by a open-steroid policy, something John McCain rightly pointed out. Open steroid use, with lesser and lesser oversight, would begin at lower and lower age groups of athletes. Soon college and high school athletes would begin steroid use in their early teens to ensure professional caliber strength and performance. Within 20 years, rookie year professional athletes would be uber-muscled freaks of nature, largely sterile and impotent from a decade of massive largely unregulated and amateurly administered doping of increasingly hybrid and not fully understood chemical agents.
Third, Sullivan claims: "Yes, it's unfair when some players use them and others don't. But the answer to that might just as well be universal steroid use as a universal ban. I think trying to stop this is almost certainly futile (the steroid technology almost always out-strips the testing technology) and not obviously virtuous."
Testing abilities would certainly NOT lag behind in MLB or any other league if the leagues had federal law to contend with, and the players would welcome the medical protection provided - if no one else is doing it, I don't have to. But Sullivan's whole argument is quite weak (and quite unlike him, really), as if we should take no steps to prevent a harmful activity based solely on the argument that the rates of the activity are too high. That doesn't make it okay, it makes it an emergency.
Sullivan goes on to say: The notion that there is some "pure" human being out there - unaffected by the technology that now enhances our lives in so many ways - is fiction. Why are sports the only arena in which this fiction is maintained?" To claim that steroid use is not quite well understood to be harmful, and harmful in multifaceted irrevocable ways, is the true fiction here. Open steroid use would reset the bar and turn professional sports into a biogenetics experimental lab, the athletes themselves being the lab rats, and with true athleticism becoming eliminated altogether.
posted by JCH | 10:34 AM
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