Steroid Nation, or How I Overcame My Apprehensions and Learned to Love the Performance Enhancing Society (Golden Ram III)

In the entire history of the United States, the mantra of its people has always been "Do what you can to get ahead of the other guy." Our persisting desire to succeed, and especially, to succeed more than others, is the driving, capitalist force of advancement for any human—it is intrinsic in our nature. Thus, it should be surprising to no one that, upon seeing an opportunity such as steroids, there are many athletes that are willing to grasp at this opportunity to advance themselves. What is surprising, however, is the completely unwarranted and often hypocritical public backlash against free choice, capitalist competition, and, ultimately, the frontier of human advancement.

Horrific health anomalies, impotence, and death aside, there is no denying that steroids do provide performance benefits to athletes, fans, and all of society. Most notably in baseball (where individual performance is much more easily gauged than other sports that are more "team-based"), we have seen a power surge in amazing feats and performances and broken records, and we have seen the dramatic decline of players who suddenly discontinue steroid use (indicating just how drastically steroids had improved that player from his "natural state"). The amazing feats achieved by such players, possible only through heavy steroid use, in turn appease many sport fans, increasing interest and overall revenues for the industry, not to mention the revenue, research, and jobs provided by a viable steroid-manufacture industry. It's a win-win-win-win situation: steroid producers, with a viable industry and revenue; the players, with heightened salaries for their heightened performance; the fans, with a more exciting and more appealing game; and the industry as a whole, with more fan interest and revenue (which goes to the owners, some of which trickles down to all employees of the industry, which in turn add to the consumer spending that fuels the economy).

How then, could anyone possibly denounce steroid use as a horrific blemish upon our nation and upon our sporting world? Admittedly, steroids do have some detrimental health effects on the human body. Aside from increasing muscle development, the hormone creation stimulation also lessens the body's reliance on natural hormone production, which can lead to chemical imbalances, elevated blood pressure, liver disease, cardiac arrest, and in many cases, death. Is it then, a duty for our government or our society to control the health decisions that people inflict upon themselves? Unlike second-hand smoking, or public drunkenness (which can lead to harmful acts committed as a direct result of being in a drunken state), steroid use will only affect the health of the individual making the decision to use steroids. If, from a mere health viewpoint, the only effect is on the individual who consciously makes the decision, then there is no necessity for government (or any external body) to limit this freedom of choice.

It would not only be wrong, but hypocritical to claim that steroid use must be banned to protect the health of athletes. The American public doesn't care a single bit about athletes' health. This is proved by the very existence of boxing. Or lineman and gymnasts that train and play at perpetually overweight or underweight extremes. Not only do we not care for athletes, we even promote the degradation of their health by applauding those athletes who are "tough" enough to "play through the pain." A player may be risking a fractured spinal cord, risking paraplegia for the rest of his life, risking the endangerment of his own welfare, and the welfare of his dependents, but… “Oh, he’s out there risking it all to help win the game. What a great team player.” Under this same logic, steroid-using athletes today should be cheered for "taking one for the team", by suffering through shrunken testicles and shortened lifespans, in order to help their team win games.

Backlash against steroid use also rests on the claim that athletes, as role models, wield influence on the actions of children and prospective athletes, so athletes have a duty to uphold a righteous moral standard. This is a ridiculous expectation, for a myriad of reasons, but primarily because athletes are horrible role models. Steroids aside, athletes are constantly spitting sunflower seeds/chew/mucus everywhere (which would be considered littering anywhere outside of a stadium), whine for better contracts, find amazingly public ways to get into legal trouble, bail out of college early (or skip it altogether), and perhaps worst of all for a role model, occupy a position of fame, wealth, and ease in society that the average young person will likely never attain. Athletes are different from the average person in one aspect, and that is their proficiency in a certain sport. Thus it would be wrong for anyone to expect athletes to adhere to a higher moral standard than the rest of us, and it would be wrong for adults to encourage children to view athletes as moral paragons—they do not have, nor do they claim to have, any moral superiority over the average adult. Accusing an athlete of being a poor moral role model for children is akin to accusing the President of being a poor role model to aspiring rap musicians. Parents are expecting the wrong people to teach their children morality.

Perhaps the only reasonable argument against steroids is its effect on competition. Many critics argue that those athletes who use steroids have an advantage over those athletes who don’t use steroids. Although this is quite obvious, is there anything about steroids that makes its use an unfair advantage? After all, athletes with great genes are born with accelerated muscle development, yet no one ever cries out “She’s the daughter of Muhammad Ali. Cheater!” Athletes born into money, superstar athletes with huge salaries, or internationally, athletes from wealthy countries like the United States, can afford personal trainers, and ultra-advanced surgeries, and hundred-million dollar training facilities, and hi-tech custom swimming/track suits, and personal nutritionists that calculate a custom diet of nutrients and supplements. Meanwhile the lower tier athletes, like minor leaguers, or international athletes from poorer countries, can’t come close to affording that kind of attention to their athletic development. Doesn’t any player born with great genetics (which pretty much includes any player with great “natural born” talent), or any American athlete in international competition, have an inherent “unfair advantage” over players who don’t have the genes, and don’t have the money, but are just as dedicated to training and development?

Even outside of sports, we experience in, and often participate in, ‘unfair advantages’ everyday. Every year, millions of students, whether of their own accord or pressured by parents, enroll into SAT prep courses, and the industry is growing exponentially. However, aren’t students who take an SAT prep course “cheaters” too? Doesn’t a program like Kaplan or Princeton Review, which promises, “a 200-point increase if you take this $900 course, or your money back!” blatantly guarantee a ‘performance gain’ if a student simply has the money? Don’t students, who happen to be born into families that can afford $900 for such a prep course, have an “unfair advantage” over students in lower-income families, who can’t afford to buy their children 200-point score boosts?

What of big-label musicians, who have the capital resources of a producer and can afford a staff of backup musicians, high-quality recording equipment, and mass marketing? Assuming their talents are otherwise the same, doesn’t any professional musician have an “unfair advantage” over any indy musician, who has to make do with his or her own voice, with amateur equipment, with word-of-mouth marketing--but otherwise produces music of the same quality? What of the numerous boy bands, pop stars, and rappers of today who digitally ‘enhance’ their voices through post-production editing? Doesn’t this artificially improve the sound of those musicians, and put those artists who simply publish what they can record at a competitive disadvantage?

What of the entertainment industry, and actresses who enhance their appearance through cosmetic surgery—breast implants, liposuction, wrinkle-erasing toxins? In many ways, cosmetic surgery in the entertainment industry parallels the steroid issue in professional sports. Aren’t entertainers resorting to a “beauty-enhancing” procedure, to improve their performance in the entertainment industry? Doesn’t this give them an “unfair advantage” over those actresses who elect not to have cosmetic surgery? Doesn’t seeing women with surgically augmented breasts pressure other, lesser-breasted actresses to have implants of their own, or face a competitive handicap when auditions for the next big role come around? Cosmetic surgery, like steroids, is something which artificially enhances the performance of an industry, and pressures everyone to conform to its use, or otherwise be left behind by the competition which does use it.

Steroid use, if anything, is a way to balance out the playing field, to give regular players the same accelerated muscle development enjoyed by athletes with great genes or athletes who buy their way to medical attention and athletic development, and center athletic success solely on dedication to training and work ethic (the only universal rule of sports is that you must train to get better—genes/steroids/bought attention simply serve to accelerate it), which, in a capitalist society, is the only attribute of people that we should be rewarding. Is it fair that, even if I am ten times as dedicated, and work ten times as hard, and devote ten times as much time and effort into training, I still will never be a better athlete than a Greg Maddux who, because of his naturally-born talent, can succeed in the sport with little or no effort devoted? Is it fair that, even if I put in 24/7 work hours, bribe all the right people, and come up with absolutely genius business ideas, I will still never be as wealthy as some kid who was born into a billionaire's inheritance?

No, it is not—but there is little we can do about it. If we really wanted a "fair" environment, we would have to remove every single "unfair advantage" that existed in society, including ones inherent from birth. Not only would we have to redistribute wealth to remove the advantages of rich people, we’d have to outlaw any sort of inheritance or money transfer between generations, so that everyone starts off in life at an equal level—a dirt-poor level. At birth we’d have to bang smart babies’ heads to give them concussions, inject muscle-killing enzymes into strong babies, and lop the boobs off of large-breasted ones. And how about more embedded traits, like the charisma that constantly hampers the social lives of the geek populations? Would we have to stitch down the tongues of charismatic babies at the first sign of “How you doin’?” No sir, to take away such alleged “unfair” advantages would not only be communist, but it would lead society down the path of the corporate police state. To do so would be to homogenize the masses. To do so would be to promote the breeding of a world culture, entirely nondescript.

This of course, would not only be impossible to achieve, but as a society, disturbingly masochistic (more on this later). Our world is inherently unfair. And thus, any so-called "unfair advantage" is relatively a fair one. We cannot eliminate all unfair advantages, so the next best thing is to make the playing field as fair as possible by giving everyone an "unfair advantage". If we cannot take away the athletic man's natural born genes or the rich man's money, the next best thing we can do is give the poor, downtrodden man steroids, so that he may stand a chance in the sporting world against his already-advantaged adversaries.

Why then, do we turn a blind eye to, or even accept and embrace, students who take prep classes to enhance their ‘test performance’, or musicians who use sound-editing to enhance their ‘vocal performance’, or entertainers who use cosmetic surgery to enhance their ‘aesthetic performance’, but condemn athletes who use steroids to enhance their ‘athletic performance’? The simple answer is in our perspective of the industries. The testing industry, the music industry, and the entertainment industry, are not typically ‘competitive’ industries. We cheer on our kids, our favorite musicians, our favorite entertainers, but if someone else outperforms them, well, more power to them; we’d like to see everyone succeed. The sporting world is an industry that is bred upon competition; our sole interest is seeing our guy or our teams win—whether that be through the success of our players, or the failure of the enemy. Thus, when someone from an opposing team outperforms our favorite players, we resent—rather than embrace—their achievements, and jump upon steroids as an “unfair advantage” they had in beating us. We don’t, after all, jump down the throats of our neighbors when we find out that their kids got a higher SAT score than our kids—and that the Kaplan course they took contributed to that. We don’t lament, “Digital vocal enhancement makes her voice sound too good. Think of the proletariat, #@&%$ cheater!” Maybe it is what we should do. But we are more likely to ask our neighbors for advice on how to sign up for such a class, and to groove to whatever music sounds good, and to lust over the actresses with the most surgically enhanced bodies—all the while completely ignoring the means by which they got there.

And, well... what is wrong with that? Don't we want to see everyone succeed? What kind of sick society are we, that we thrive on the failure of others, so that those on our team may succeed relatively. Would we want half of our artists to churn out atrocious crap and sell it out to the market as "music"? Would we want to go to basketball games where 10 out of 20 on the cheerleading squad are flat-chested? No, of course not! We want all artists to come out with great albums loaded with hit tracks every single time. We want to see slim bodies and big boobs on all 20 cheerleaders. What then, is wrong with players using steroids? Why on Earth are we restricting a group of players to 47, 42, 31, 18 homeruns, when each of those players could be mashing 57, 52, 41, 28 out of the park every year? As politicians fight to restrict steroid usage, why don't they go ahead and pass a constitutional amendment banning post-production audio editing, so that we can all listen to the inferior quality music of singers' "natural voices"--and plunge our world into the Dark Ages of music. While we're at that, why don't we ban all calculators, lest we give our immoral NASA rocket engineers or ethicless bank accountants an "unfair advantage" over the other prospective employee who is noble enough to do the math by the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper and 'natural ability'.

Steroids, like test preparation, post-production editing, cosmetic surgery, or any technological innovation man has ever achieved, is a way to "enhance society". No doubt, steroids make things easier, make developing athletic ability easier--just like cars have made transportation easier, phones have made communication easier, computers have made information access easier, and antidepressants have made everything easier. We don't (or at least we shouldn't) force researchers to spend 5 hours at a library looking up some obscure fact, when a 5-second Google search will find the same information. We don't force people to walk cross-city to get to work, when a car or bus will get them there in 10 minutes. We don't force people to write postal letters to their relatives across the country, when communication can be achieved much more easily through a phone call or e-mail. If antidepressants didn't have any harmful side effects, why shouldn't we use 'Instant Euphoria Pills' so that depressed people wouldn't have to be in such a perpetual state? Why then, do we artificially force our athletes to struggle, to go into slumps and suffer through developmental roadblocks, when a method exists to help their job performance and make their lives easier? And why, as fans, do we force ourselves to sit through boring games where lanky pitchers toss underpowered 74-mph changeups that even lankier hitters fail to ground out beyond the infield, when a method exists to make our games exciting, to juice up our pitchers to hurl 100+ mph heaters at juiced-up hitters who slam the shots back into the stands, or at least strike out mightily. Steroids not only enhance performance, they enhance fans' entertainment, they enhance business revenues, they enhance the economy, they enhance society. Just as if we were to ban cars, or phones, or calculators, to ban steroids in the name of "tradition" is to curb the limits of human achievement, to ban steroids is to artificially retard the advance of human society.