On January 15, 2008 Reason Senior Editor (now a Huffington Post reporter) Radley Balko participated in a debate in New York City on the topic of performance-enhancing drugs in sports, sponsored by Intelligence Squared. The following is from his 2008 post on Reason.com.
On the train ride from D.C. this morning, we passed through Baltimore. It reminded me of one of my favorite authors, Baltimore native H.L. Mencken, who I think would've had a good laugh at the hypocrisy, the posturing, and the moral prudery associated with the steroid controversy. Eighty years ago, Mencken aptly summarized this debate when he wrote, quote:
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it."
Let me start by saying that I believe private sports organizations should be able to set their own rules, and that they should be free to discipline in any manner they see fit the players who break those rules. I don't think Congress should forcibly allow performance enhancing substances in sports any more than I think Congress should prohibit them.
That said, we're here today to debate what those rules ought to be.
So why exactly do people to ban some substances from professional sports?
If it's about fairness and competition, I'm dubious. Take Rep. Tom Davis, one of the more camera-hungry politicians to demagogue this issue. After the 2000 census, Rep. Davis maneuvered to have his congressional district gerrymandered to include as many Republicans as possible, ensuring his continual reelection, and limiting the number of real options for his constituents. He ran the next year unopposed. Davis also snuck a provision into an unrelated piece of federal legislation preventing an apartment complex from going up in his district because, he said, he feared it would bring too many Democrats into his district.
This guy is cheating at democracy, and he's lecturing baseball players about fairness.
It's hard to believe the steroid panic is really about the safety of our athletes, either. My co-panelist Dr. Fost I think has ably shown that the alleged side affects of anabolic steroids are overstated, and the negative side effects of HGH are negligible at best.
If we want to talk about health risks and professional sports, we might discuss the ballooning, unrelated-to-steroids weight of NFL linemen over the last 20 years, and the corresponding drop in life expectancy that's come with it.
Or we might talk about the particularly hellish world of thoroughbred horse racing jockeys, who subject themselves to sweat boxes, diuretics and suppositories, and intentional eating disorders.
In fact, any world-class athlete subjects his body to stresses it wasn't really designed to endure.
As we've seen with government bans on consensual activity -- from alcohol to gambling to cocaine to prostitution -- prohibitions not only don't work, they make the activity in question more dangerous by pushing it underground.
So what about the children? As with just about every paternalistic policy dating back to alcohol prohibition, many a politician has iterated over the last few years that we need to ban performance enhancing drugs "for the children."
But survey data actually shows that teen steroid use has mirrored the use of other illicit drugs over the years. It went up mildly in the 1990s, and has since either dropped slightly or leveled off since 2000. It's likely that the same trends that govern cocaine or marijuana use govern teen steroid use far more than what's happening in the sports pages.
In fact, a study released last year -- and of the few studies to attempt to find out what motivates teens to take steroids -- found that the most reliable indicator of steroid use was a teen's own body image and self-esteem.
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The suggestion -- and I think we can all agree it's pretty intuitive -- is that the teenage boys who do take steroids do so not because they want to look like Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire, but because they want to look good for teenage girls.
So what is this debate really all about?
I'd submit it's about paternalism and control. A few luddites and prudes have successfully induced a full-blown moral panic over a set of substances that for whatever reason have attracted the ire of the people who have made it their job to tell us what is and isn't good for us.
Our society has an oddly schizophrenic relationship with pharmaceuticals and medical technology. If something can be said to be "natural," we tend to be OK with it. If it seems lab-made or synthetic we tend to be leery. But even synthetic drugs and man-made technology seem to be OK if the aim is to make sick or broken people whole again.
It's when we talk about expanding or transcending what we've come to consider "normal," be it through psychoactive drugs, performance-enhancing drugs, or genetic or biomedical technology, that a certain uneasiness sets in.
There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education last month about university professors taking stimulants like Adderall to increase their academic productivity. Oddly, the article quoted several professors who considered this "cheating" at academics. I have to confess, I don't understand this way of thinking. Academics is the search for truth and knowledge. If a drug can make that search more productive with few side effects, why in the world wouldn't you want to take it?
It's also important to note that what we consider perfectly natural and acceptable today was quite out of the ordinary not so long ago. One hundred years ago, life expectancy in the U.S. was 50 years of age. Today it's 78. Thanks to technology, medicine, and pharmaceuticals we are today taller, stronger, faster, healthier, and can expect to live longer than ever before. Genetically enhanced agriculture, anti-aging technology, and other advancements we've yet to see today -- all of which seem as foreign to us now as penicillin likely seemed 50 years ago -- will push our longevity even higher.
It's an old cliché that sports is a metaphor for the human condition. But there's a lot of truth to it. As technology helped humanity obliterate these milestones and move beyond what until 100 years ago had been a long, bleak history, similar advances in nutrition, training, and using technology to improve technique have enabled sports records to fall with astonishing regularity. Tennis players serve in excess of 120 mph. Record times in the 100, 200, mile, and marathon continue to crumble.
Sports is about exploring and stretching the limits of human potential. Going back even to the pre-modern Olympics, when athletes ate live bees and crushed sheep testicles to get a leg up on the competition, sports has never been some wholesome display of physical ability alone. Ingenuity, innovation, nutrition, and knowledge about what makes us faster and stronger (and avoiding what might do more harm than good) has always been a part of the game.
It shouldn't be surprising, then, that many of the biggest proponents of banning performance enhancing drugs in sports are also suspect of continued advances in human achievement. Take Leon Kass, formerly President Bush's top adviser on bioethics. The same Mr. Kass who champions rigorous drug testing in sports has also spent much of his career actually lamenting rising average human life expectancy, which he considers contrary to some odd concept of the natural order.
Of course there have been luddites and naturalists like Mr. Kass standing athwart the tide of human progress for much of recorded history. The essence of the disagreement today I think is that people like Mr. Kass and Mr. Pound have a decidedly different definition of what's pure, natural, and human than what I do.
For me, the essence of humanity is the pursuit of knowledge, and broadening and conquering the outer limits of our potential. For others, "human" by definition entails concrete limitations -- it's more about adhering to and abiding by well-defined historical, cultural, moral, and philosophical concepts of personhood. I'd like to live to be 150. Leon Kass believes we should all be content with 75.
I think each of us ought to be free to choose and pursue our respective notions of humanity as we may. Let there be sports leagues that thrive on "pure sport," whatever that is, and let there be sports leagues where athletes are left to balance their own health and career longevity with technology, pharmacology, and the quest for a competitive advantage. If Mr. Kass wants to volunteer to be euthanized at 75, that's his prerogative. Me, I'll eagerly lap up what science can conjure -- both to extend my life, and to better appreciate and enjoy life while I'm living it.
Unfortunately many who take our opponents' position aren't content with merely adhering to their own view of what's human and what's acceptably "natural." They demand that the rest of us accept their concept of humanity, too. People like Mr. Pound and Mr. Kass want Congress and other government bodies to impose their will on society. Because they, better than we, know what's best for us.
Of course even if they're right and I'm wrong about the morality and propriety of some of these issues, a free society isn't really free at all if it doesn't include the freedom to make bad decisions.
Our opponents want to legislate away what they believe are the bad decisions. To borrow from H.L. Mencken, they believe they need to rule sports in order to save it.
Follow Radley Balko on Twitter: www.twitter.com/radleybalko
However, when you talk about sports as as a "human body" achievement, athletes naturally do lower life expectancy merely by training past the body's health benefits already, and chemicals et al. are used to abuse it even further. Do we want athletic contests, or the best chemical contests?
If you took a poll of athletes to determine if it should be open to all chemical interference, how many would rather have it totally banned? Only the sneaky lying cheaters are using chemicals now, if it were totally open to all chemicals, they would not have an advantage anymore ... I am sure most would then say no to drugs. Sponsors should also be held accountable for the athletes clean performance.THAT would get the money more in line with true performance. Huge corporations have a little too much ability to influence the " policing " and athletic organizations.
If you do some research on high-performance sport, you come to realize that a great many things are 'unfair' (Top-Secret 2010 anyone?), unhealthy (look up "female athlete triad" or read Beamish & Borowy, 1987), and not aligned with the sport we're sold by the International Olympic Committee and others with a vested interest in keeping the image of sport 'clean.'
Doping is a symbol of a society that values result over substance & method. Forget the fact that using PEDs has serious side effects; forget the fact that the nfl is seeing a rash of brain related diseases as a fallout from much larger, much faster players.
Remember in 1985 when "Refrigerator" Perry was 305 lbs? Now all NFL lineman are well over 300lbs. Remember Chris Benoit - the wrestler who murdered his family?
There are rules throughout society. Speed limits, tax laws, zoning laws. Not all are fair but there is a process to change them & a democracy that supports the rules.
Without those, it is a free-for-all.
Like all who go outside of the rules, Lance Armstrong should be held accountable. Not all are; certainly wall st/bay st types seem to get away with whatever they do. It does not justify their actions.
The reason it is cheating versus progression, is that all cheaters never admit what they are doing. They lie about it. they deny. If it were natural progression, they'd be open about it - but they are not.
They are part of a group of people that uses deceit, illegal things to gain an davantage. It is neither desirable nor admirable.
Hold sponsors accountable for clean athletes. They would certainly fix the testing issues in a hurry if their million dollar babies needed incentives to be clean.
What Lance did was wrong , it took away the opportunity from athletes who were willing to play by the rules. Playing by the rules is the foundation of our society, when people make their own rules up without regard for anything but their own personal gain no matter what you institution you refer to it falls apart.
The largest factor in the increase of our life span is not from drugs. A person who lives past 50 today has almost the same chance of dying of old age as they would have 200 years ago. The fact that more people reach 50 is because we live safer and take less risk, we protect our children from harm and we have decreased infant mortality. Drugs play a very small part, the morals and responsibility towards our societies as whole set us apart from our forefathers and their life span.
Our monetized culture isn't concerned with a persons character or altruistic pursuits of personal betterment unless there is a payoff. Appearing to win will suffice.
O,nm your a progressive, you have no regard for people to being with.
"Sports is about exploring and stretching the limits of human potential". I think that's a simplistic statement intended to bolster the author's arguement. Here's a cynical point of view after taking off the rose colored glasses: Professional sports is about entertainment, money and winning.
If the author really had a strong arguement based on its own merits, there would be no reason for him to put down others as "Luddites" and "prudes".
All or nothing. Simple.
But now we don't believe that. Or at least many people don't. Now people look at athletes as people who make way too much money to play a game. And when you add drugs/doping to that? The idea that these athletes are making millions a year, not because they are the most talented but because they cheated the most/did the most drugs, and it is embarassing. Why should we care at all if that is the case? What value does sport have then if it is just about who can do the most drugs or cheat the most?
Seriously, when did sport stop being about who played the best and become about who could do the most drugs, or who could bend the rules the most? What happened to skill?
I can choose to take my arthritis medicine via suppository should my stomach become too fragile.
It was a place outside the cheating, lying, grifting and short-changing we all experience in our commercial lives.
A place where excellence was honoured, not cupidity.
A place where honour meant more than the chimera of fame.
Sport, like Art, was a place we kept reserved for the best of ourselves.
No more.