Of course steroids give the athlete an advantage! But the only unfair part is making it illegal. Would i take steroids? Hell no! But that's because hitting a hundred home runs in a season isn't worth shrunken balls to me. If I wanted to get laid that badly, I’d play in a band, and at least that way my parts wouldn’t be too shriveled from the “growth hormones” to be of any use. Any athlete who wants to be the best has to make certain compromises: High School wrestlers stop smoking weed during the season, so they don’t fail the obligatory drug test. College athletes suffer academically so that they can go to all the practices and be in the first line (anyone who thinks this isn’t true should talk to several college athletes, who would tell of coaches who told them they needed to cut class to practice for hours at a time). Professional athletes spend hours of pain and suffering pushing their body to always be stronger, and if they really want to be the best, they take testicle shrinking pills and injections to make them hit a little white ball across a big green and brown field, over a blue fence, and into a technicolored stadium seating area.
This whole thing reeks of Harrison Bergeron, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut in which all the exceptional members of society were forced to wear handicaps, either chains to way down the strong, glasses with bad prescriptions for those with good eyesight, and headphones that play distracting noises for the intelligent. Steroids are one of many acknowledged methods for boosting the performance of an athlete. Steroids alone won’t make a great player, much like weight lifting alone won’t do the trick either. It’s only natural that if there’s something that enhances the performance of the game, those who perform will use it. It’s impossible to differentiate (in an objective and scientific manner) between any steroids and any other substance that gives players and edge (such as water). The chemicals in food enhance the performance just as much as the chemicals in growth hormones do. (In fact, they are quite a bit more essential.) And the argument that everyone eats and sleeps, but anything beyond what normal people do is cheating holds no water either; when was the last time you saw an average joe pumping iron for 7 hours straight. The use of steroids should be seen as it is: another part of a regiment athletes go thru in order to be the best. There is no unfair advantage in substances widely available to all, and it’s about time the established sports world stopped holding athletes back.
(I think i lifted a phrase or two off wiki, when i was trying to remember which short story it was. I knew it was in welcome to the monkey house, so i checked on wikipedia, and found read the explanations of the stories until i found the right one. And then the phrase about making noises in smart people's ears was imbedded in my head.)
