He's Outraged Over The Steroid Outrage

Posted 3/21/2005 7:38 PM

Outraged over the steroids outrage
By Robert Lipsyte

As a longtime steroid user, I'm confused by the frenzied reaction to the juicy news coming out of baseball these days.

Why should we care what those players do, as long as they entertain us? Who wouldn't expect pro athletes, like the rest of us, to try to be the best they could be? And how has this become a chance for yet more face time for flabby moralists instead of an opportunity to gather some necessary information?

Here's what I want to know: Exactly which performances are enhanced — and how — by which anabolic steroids, androgens, human growth hormone and whatever else athletes shoot, swallow and sniff? What are the long-term and short-term effects? Are those enhancements and side effects different for adolescents and adults, men and women?
I have ethical questions, too. How different is steroid use from cosmetic surgery for the male TV newsies reporting these stories, from Botox for actresses, beta blockers for public speakers and all the new psychological drugs for well people with the willies — the shy, the anxious, the fidgety and the sexually apprehensive?
Speaking of which, consider the tomcat fight between two of baseball's best-known sluggers and congressional testifiers, Jose Canseco and his childhood pal, Rafael Palmeiro. In his best seller, Juiced, Canseco claims he personally injected steroids into Palmeiro when they both played for George W. Bush's Texas Rangers. Palmeiro denies it. Of course, Palmeiro, as baseball's most famous pitchman for Viagra, is no stranger to performance-enhancing drugs.

"Performance-enhancement is in a gray area," says Robert Klitzman, co-director of Columbia University's Center for Bioethics. "Would you include new technologies to improve cognitive abilities? How about access to SAT prep coaching? Assisted pregnancies?"

Meanwhile, athletes certainly have no ethical dilemma about using steroids, says Michael Miletic, a psychiatrist whose Detroit-based practice includes high school, college and professional athletes. "Steroids are totally embedded in the sports culture. We need to get past the finger-pointing. There's been a wholesale abandonment of critical analysis."

My steroid use

Analyze this: I've been shooting steroids for almost 15 years, since a third cancer operation left me unable to produce testosterone naturally. Once a month, I nail one of my quadriceps with a 22-gauge needle and pump in the oily yellow fluid. Without it, my prescribing surgeon tells me, I would be physically fatigued and mentally sluggish, lose my sex drive, be achy and depressed. No question, I'm taking a performance-enhancing drug.

Yet, even with it, I can't hit a major-league fastball, sack a moving NFL quarterback or bench-press 500 pounds. Using steroids, most people can train harder and recover more quickly from breakdown and injury. But to reach all-pro you have to be what athletes call a "freak" with those potentially all-pro genes to tweak.
But chemicals also help high school boys pump themselves into beach studs, put on extra pounds for the football team and gain strength and stamina for the campaign to win a college scholarship and a pro contract. This is the danger zone, says Miletic, who is far less concerned with the middle-aged Barry Bonds' possible career choices than with unsupervised drug use by kids.

"This is where we should be paying attention," Miletic says. "First of all, there is adult complicity here. Some parents and coaches are actively helping kids get drugs, others are looking the other way. How could you not notice the dramatic changes in your child's body?

"I don't believe kids are taking steroids because they think it helped Mark McGwire. They're taking it because teammates, opponents, a strength coach, a gym owner, is telling them it will make them better," he says.

Performance-enhancers have been around for a long time, and as our games, from Little League to Super Bowl, became less classrooms for character building and more stages for spectaculars, the pressure to enhance performance swelled like Popeye's biceps (his drug was spinach, remember?). We expect our sports heroes to do anything to win for us, to find the edge, to take risks, even to play hurt. If they don't, they're replaced by those who will.

'Where does cheating begin?'

At the same time, the self-help movement made the concept of improvement, of reinvention, of taking charge of body and psyche, a kind of mandate for everybody. To refuse to at least try to find a way to feel better, look better, do better was regarded as almost a crime. Is self-help from a mind-numbing mantra more moral than self-help from the tip of a needle?

"It's going to get even more complicated," says Klitzman, the Columbia bioethicist, "as techniques for screening embryos and scanning brains become more sophisticated. Scientists will be looking for stupidity genes and smart pills. Cosmetic psycho-pharmacology is an area where people with money will have advantages over people who don't. Is that fair? In an ideal world, there would be a level playing field. Exactly where does cheating begin?"

I'll be watching baseball this season for guys who look less bulked-up than they did last season. How many are using newer, riskier, test-proof drugs? That's probably not fair.

The pundits and politicians will declare a moral victory and move on, leaving our questions unanswered. That's cheating.

Robert Lipsyte, a former New York Times sports columnist, wrote about cancer in his memoir, In the Country of Illness. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

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