[tt] Reason: Should We Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports?

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Should We Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports?
http://www.reason.com/news/show/124577.html

One argument in favor.

Radley Balko | January 23, 2008

On January 15, Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko participated in a
debate in New York City on the topic of performance-enhancing drugs
in sports, sponsored by Intelligence Squared. Video text of his
initial argument follow. Check this YouTube page for video of the
other presentations, rebuttals, and Q&A.

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 copanelist 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
horseracing jockeys, who subject themselves to sweatboxes, 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.
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 okay with it. If it seems lab-made or
synthetic we tend to be leery. But even synthetic drugs and manmade
technology seem to be okay 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 we consider perfectly natural and
acceptable today was quite out of the ordinary not so long ago. 100
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 ate crushed sheep testicles to get a leg up on the
competition, sports has never been some wholesome display of physical
ability alone. Ingenuity, innovation, 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 advisor 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 that 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, pharamacology, 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 it while I'm living it.
Unfortunately many who take our opponents position aren't content
with merely holding 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 what some may
believe are 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.