The typical libertarian opinion on steroids is "Who cares? It's your body." Tyler Cowen offers an interesting take:
I don't usually recycle posts but this one is from the early days of MR, and my view on steroids hasn't changed much. Excerpt:Note that the Olympics probably prosper more from competitive balance than from a single dominant country. Was it really so much fun for the rest of the world to watch the Soviets win all those medals? This would predict that the Olympics should take special care to ban performance-enhancing drugs, which is indeed the case.Baseball is again thrown under a cloud, and one obvious question is how much we have close substitutes for our increasingly damaged pride in the sport. The likely eventual outcome is a long-run equilibrium where all performance enhancements are allowed, thereby placing an inefficient tax on amateurs and performers who don't need to be the very best.
A running friend pointed out ten or fifteen years ago that 100 yard dash world records are only set in the latter part of the lull between the introduction of tests for new steroids. There's something upsetting about the fact that athletic contests are less and less a measurement of your willingness to train, and more and more a measure of your body's responsiveness to arcane chemical cocktails. On the other hand, I don't see how to stop it, given that athletes at that level are pretty much insane. Asked whether they'd give up five years or ten of their life in order to be the world champion in your sport, most of them just kind of blink at you and try to figure out what the trick in the question is. Then they ask if Satan has empowered you to cut that kind of sweetheart deal. So the lesser risks posed by steroids are probably not going to deter very many of them.
Yes, to some extent, we're selecting for athletes who are willing to do extreme and dangerous things to their body in order to win--but then, most olympic and pro athletes, except perhaps swimmers, are destroying their bodies anyway and we find that laudable. Athletes from runners to pro football players will all mostly end their lives crippled by joint problems and old injuries; boxers will end their lives ten or so IQ points lower than they started. But no one worries that we're selecting our athletes for a willingness to trade a healthy old age for victory now. And if you're willing to do to your shoulders what pitchers do to theirs, I'm not sure how big a step it is to inject testosterone analogs.
Given that, what's the healthy equilibrium? As Tyler suggests, I think it's probably allowing the drugs. That way athletes aren't benefiting from asymmetrical information; everyone has the same opportunity to trade health and sanity for wealth and fame.
The problem with using performance enhancing drugs is that it would not be contained at the Olympic / Professional levels. Eventually it would work its way down to the College / High School / Jr High levels. For every athlete you see on TV 'on the juice' there would be thousands of unknown athletes also trying to do the same.
Remember, too, that a lot of the commonly used "performance enhancers" aren't really even so much to build muscle mass as to speed recovery from injury. The drugs themselves don't replace training -- they allow you to train harder than you otherwise would, instead of being sidelined by inflammation and overuse injuries. It's the same idea as getting cortisone injections for joint injuries, which is incredibly common among the general populace.
Professional level: I say let them use whatever they want. College/school: Undecided. Olympics: better to get rid of this stupid, bloated, minority interest farce altogether, unless it is funded entirely by sponsorship or voluntary contributions. Sorry, off topic, but I resent having my tax money wasted on the 2012 games.
A good part of the pleasure of watching competitive sports is the admiration one feels for human excellence. When people have risen to the heights through hard work and natural talents, to be able to hit a home run off of a 95 MPH fastball or return a kick 90 yards for a touchdown, fans can sit and watch and delight in the ability and effort of the athletes.
But when the fan begins to suspect that it's just a product of doping, the whole thing starts to seem phony. I used to enjoy watching Jose Canseco hit home runs and steal bases. But after I heard him admit that he would never have made it out of the minor leagues without steroids, all his achievements seemed hollow. Had I known at the time I wouldn't even have watched him, just as I don't watch Barry Bonds any more.
They've got to get rid of the doping. And libertarianism has nothing to do with this (libertarians are not anarchists, after all).
Are those of us running 25 miles a week really going to be worse off for it? I ask in all seriousness, not sarcastically. It seems to me that knee problems is better than getting diabetes at 55 (or heart disease, which you're more likely to get if you don't exercise)...and if that's the case, it seems that (non-elite) athletes aren't being masochistic, but rather making perfectly rational, life-prolonging/improving choices.
While I disagree with the main point of the post, I do agree that yes, NFL players are going to be suffering in their old age. This is why when the time comes (and perhaps even now), I support giving to whatever NFL old-timer associations exist.
I support the indefinite storage of samples (blood, urine, hair) from MLB players. This is the only way to help ensure a clean sport in the future.
In the narrow economic sense, I suppose you're right. Doping is an intractable and unenforceable problem - the elegant, libertarian solution is simply to bring doping to the surface, and let the players sort it out.
But as a sports fan, I derive a great deal of psychic utility from the (ostensibly) noble competition of human will and physical ability. Most professional sports would lose much of their passion (read: marketing revenue) if doping were allowed.
As a business, the professional sports world must continue to maintain the perception of fair play. Players will continue to attempt covert doping to maximize their performance and salaries. Each has great economic incentive to do so, so I don't anticipate this situation changing.
I favor a completely unrestricted pro level and wheatever tests we can maintain on the amateurs and children, with perhaps a "tax" on the professional leagues to keep testing methodology and ubiquity abreast with development in performance enhancers. This may seem quite un-libertarian, but the very presence of highly compensated professional leagues creates a powerful incentive for those who have not completed puberty to ingest hormonal cocktails, a clear negative. This externality can be addressed by those leagues to some degree.
Clearly, however the only real solution is to find some way to suck the money out of children's athletics. As long as there are financial incentives, athletes will move heaven and earth to increase performance and they will be doing so completely rationally--not, as the sports media histerics would tell you "copying their heroes." When ESPN and their ilk stop hyping highschool athletes and helping tranform every facet of college athletics into a multi-billion dollar industry , I'll take them seriously
I don't know that there's much evidence that 25 miles a week of high-impact running helps more against heart disease, diabetes, etc. than some lesser amount of lower-impact activity-- especially taking into account the danger that athletic injury may make even that lower-impact exercise more difficult.
Of course, there's always costs and benefits-- running 25 miles a week obviously burns more calories than spending the same time walking, while walking that much per week would take three or more times as long. But if running at 20 or 30 or 40 means that your knees hurt so much that you can't even walk long distances at 50 or 60 when heart disease and the like tend to take their greatest toll (and I grant I don't know how big that "if" is), the ultimate result may not be optimized for health.
(It may still be a reasonable tradeoff of risk for benefit if the runner gets enjoyment out of the sport itself, of course.)
The people using steroids train just as hard, if not harder, than others (one of the benefits of steroids is the ability to train harder and more often, productively).
And willingness to train isn't historically a factor AFAIK, except insofar as it affects performance. There are plenty of dedicated athletes who will never be anything but minor leaguers or also-rans because of their basic genetic endowments, and conversely no one checks to see if the gold medalist put in more hours in the gym than the bronze or the first-round eliminatee. If the champ can party till dawn the night before the match and still win, no one generally has a problem with it (though if he loses, his lack of dedication may certainly be blamed).
"contests are less and less a measurement of your willingness to train" aren't they more a contest of genetic gifts? If roids can give people without a genetic gift a chance to compete - I don't have a problem with that.
The problem is that it's entertainment, not production. If doctors wanted to use some performance-enhancing drug, which made them able to stay awake for 48-hours straight with clear focus, good judgement, and heightened reaction time, but which took 20 years off the end of their lives, we'd cheer for it. Because that trade off is clearly producing something of value - saving other people's lives and treating their injuries and presumably lowering the cost of health-care indirectly. If the doctor is willing to do it, more power to them.
But with sports, it's really entertainment, so the only thing produced is the enjoyment of fans. In that case, the only way to weigh the value of it is to ask the fans. If they decide they'd rather pay 10-20% more ticket price for extra screening and enforcement, rather than go to games they feel are fraudulent, then that's obviously the way for MLB/NBA/NFL etc to go. And we don't stop other professionals from risking their health in line of their work - whether it's coal miners and firemen, or even in the entertainment field, actors and models do all sorts of crazy toxic stuff to their bodies in order to meet the physical requirements asked of them. So it's not up to society here, it's up to the fans. And not being much of a fan, I don't really care. I say let the market- er, fans, decide.
I do wonder what kind of performance-enhancing drugs we'd have if we had legal NFL, MLB, NBA, etc. markets and the Evil Pharmaceutical Companies(TM) doing the research to make them safer, rather than BALCO doing the research to make them undetectable. Is it unreasonable to think that with 30 years of professional research and a potential market worth hundreds of millions of dollars, between professional athletes and amateurs, we might have something safer and more effective than the cream and the clear?
The nuanced libertarian position is that it ought not be illegal for people to use steriods, but that it also ought to be legal for the sporting governing bodies (which should be private organizations, not governments) to create and enforce their own rules with respect to steroids.
So a libertarian should be against jailing Barry Bonds or his suppliers, but should support MLB taking whatever sanctions against him (and all the others) that they want.
I'm with the very first commenter on this thread.
The best professional athletes usually come from the best college athletes, and the best college athletes usually come from the best high school/prep athletes. Now, this isn't always a perfectly straight line, but it's reasonable to assume that if steroids are allowed at the professional level, there will be great pressure to acquire them at the college level in order to attract the attenion of pro scouts. And in order to get into the best blue-chip factory schools, it is reasonable to assume that there will be pressure for high school/prep athletes to do the same. And with the attenion being paid to athletes at younger and younger ages, this pressure could easily slide down to even pre-high school athletes at some point.
I'm not comfortable with this. If there were some magical way to make it so only the pros were juicing I suppose I could grin and bear it, but I just don't see how that's possible.
That being the case, I think the best policy (or at least the least bad one) is to test for steroids as rigorously as possible. Granted, this is far FAR from a perfect solution, but it's a lot more palatable to me than (even more) high school kids taking steroids.
View it like crime prevention... It will never be stamped out completely, but it's worth the effort to at least strongly discourage it.
to me, it seems the best regime is somewhat like what we had -- ban the use of drugs, but don't test too stringently. why? you want to ban drugs so you don't get into an arms race where players explode on the field from whatever chemical cocktail they've ingested, and also so that those without serious aspirations to be pros won't use drugs (the children, the children!). but you have to recognize that, with the money and fame at stake, and the fact that drugs really work, pros are going to take drugs (along with trying to find every other way to get an edge). so try to keep it reasonably in check, without undermining the level of play and making too many of your best players into villains.
I'm not comfortable with this. If there were some magical way to make it so only the pros were juicing I suppose I could grin and bear it, but I just don't see how that's possible.
Sounds like a run-of-the-mill enforcement problem. Ratchet up the penalties for sales to minors far enough, and you'll see results.
Has anyone else noticed the alternative parsing of Megan's first sentence? It's pretty accurate, too.
Which substances have been successfully kept from interested minors that way?
Which substances have been successfully kept from interested minors that way?
With 100% effectiveness? None, of course. When we can successfully prevent a crime with 100% effectiveness, I expect murder or child molestation will be the place we start, not steroid use.
I'd been thinking of this like any other law enforcement -- greater penalties lead to greater compliance (if that is generally untrue, it's news to me, and calls into question the very value of laws and our system of enforcement).
If you are suggesting that it is impossible to make something legal for one class of citizens, and not for another... I could see the argument, but I would have to be convinced that this is an exception.
I'm curious, though -- has pot use gone up, down, or stayed the same amongst teenagers from, say, 1970 to today (from a permissive time through the war on drugs, that is)? Cocaine use? (Not an idle question. I tried looking this up, but came up empty, and don't have time for a sustained search.)
Asked whether they'd give up five years or ten of their life in order to be the world champion in your sport, most of them just kind of blink at you and try to figure out what the trick in the question is.
Such attitudes are essential to being a champion. Everyone wants to win, very few want to do the work necessary to win. There the line is drawn. Besides those 5 or 10 years come off the back end of life, right?
Hacklehead is exactly right. Deregulating steroids would be WORSE than legalizing heroin: steroids make you, in the short term, strong, handsome, and athletic -- i.e. popular in high school.
If you think that the use of performance enhancing drugs should be limited only to those "insane" professionals willing to destroy their bodies to become champions, then the current system seems to achieve that result perfectly. What is the problem? The idea that the drugs should be allowed seems to me like more evidence of how very ill suited libertarian thinking is to public health questions.
This conflict between health and performance is a false one, based on media hype and the usual anti-drug propaganda.
The truth is that steriods, properly administered and monitored, increases health, increases lifespan, and increases virtually every category of enjoyment and performance. The problem with the anti-drug policies of athletic competition, and laws against the, are they lead to athletes not taking steriods and other performance enhancing drugs properly and intelligently, but stupidly and dangerously, leading to the usual bad outcomes. If those taking these drugs could do so openly, with proper medical oversight and according to sensible protocols, there would be no trade-off at all - as is the case with quite a few people who actually know what they are doing. In fact, proper adminstration of steriods leads to a happier, healthier life with a longer life-span than one without them. The only drawback is that it is "unnatural", whatever that means.
I'm not arguing for or against allowing athletes to use steriods at will, only pointing that the cost of prohibiting them from doing so is to make the whole enterprise far more dangerous and unhealthy than it ought to be, or actually is. These are the truths that those in charge don't want people to know about.
The libertarian prejudice on steroids is simply ignorant of the reality of arms (or in this case, biceps) races. Without controls, you'll get more people like Ken Caminiti, who turned himself from a journeyman into an MVP in the middle of the 1996 season, and was dead by 2001.
It's silly to say that all sports damage you. Baseball players traditionally live longer than the national average for men.
Golfers live forever: The top 7 golfers of the first 60 years of the 20th Century died at an average age of 82: Sarazen 97, Nelson 94, Snead 89, Hogan 84, Hagen 76, Jones 69, Vardon 66. Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, the top players of the 1960s, are all still alive.
It's silly to say that all sports damage you. ...
Golfers live forever:
I for one, don't concede that golf is a sport. If it can be played by 80 year old men in slacks, it qualifies as a game.
it qualifies as a game
I beg to differ, but only slightly. Golf is a game, but most importantly, it is a race.
If you think that the use of performance enhancing drugs should be limited only to those "insane" professionals willing to destroy their bodies to become champions, then the current system seems to achieve that result perfectly.
You're obscuring a key point here, which is that we're not discussing whether to *legalize* the drugs, but whether professional federations should test and sanction their athletes for usage (regardless of whether the drugs are acquired legally or not).
Performance-enhancing drugs aren't like cocaine and heroin -- they have legitimate uses, and are available at any pharmacy with the proper prescription. There's a large gray market in getting them sans prescription, of course, but if you have a compliant doctor, it's perfectly easy to obtain them legally.
Presently, it's actually much easier for high-school students to take steroids than for professional athletes. Random drug-testing for steroid usage is a relatively new thing at the high school level, so once you acquire the drugs, it's less likely that you'll be caught. Of course, if you don't play a competitive sport and use them for pure appearance purposes, you're not subject to testing at all. Also, there's a massive variety of performance-enhancing drugs out there, and it's very expensive for high schools to test for them all.
So, the current system doesn't actually achieve that result perfectly -- quite the opposite. It punishes professional athletes, who are capable adults, while doing very little to deter high school usage. Instead, it's advantageous for the high-school athlete to dope as much as he can, to pack on muscle mass which lasts beyond the period of usage, with a much lower risk of being caught. Lifting sanctions on professional athletes won't change that dynamic at all.
The libertarian prejudice on steroids is simply ignorant of the reality of arms (or in this case, biceps) races. Without controls, you'll get more people like Ken Caminiti, who turned himself from a journeyman into an MVP in the middle of the 1996 season, and was dead by 2001.
I don't know the details of Caminiti's death, but I'd be willing to bet that if it was due to steroid use, much of the blame is on those who have made steriods illegal or off-limits. Steriods, properly used, do not cause poor health or short life-span. If Caminiti had been able to use a qualified physician, and taken high quality pure steriods on a safe protocol, rather than just winging it on his own, he'd be healthy and happy today.
This is similar to the problem with all illegal drugs. Heroin, when taken in pure form, is both cheap and relatively safe. Its negative health effects are mostly due to its impurity and the uncertainty over its dosage. People OD because they don't know the concentration they are buying. I'm not trying to promote heroin, but ordinary usage of pharmaceutical grade heroin is far less unhealthy than alcohol addiction, and far more compatible with normal functioning in society. But people don't want to hear this, the same way they don't want to hear that steroids are really quite safe and healthy when used properly. Athletes don't tend to use steriods properly, because they think more is better, and don't know how to cycle and cleanse, etc. And so we end up with sad stories like Caminiti's.
THe problem with banning steroids and making them illegal is that we will guarantee their misuse, whereas making them legal but regulated is the only way to ensure their safe use. But people don't want that kind of compromise, they want to preach purity and promote death. This is how stupid some people are.
Re-edited for style
The libertarian prejudice on steroids is simply ignorant of the reality of arms (or in this case, biceps) races. Without controls, you'll get more people like Ken Caminiti, who turned himself from a journeyman into an MVP in the middle of the 1996 season, and was dead by 2001.
I don't know the details of Caminiti's death, but I'd be willing to bet that if it was due to steroid use, much of the blame is on those who have made steriods illegal or off-limits. Steriods, properly used, do not cause poor health or short life-span. If Caminiti had been able to use a qualified physician, and taken high quality pure steriods on a safe protocol, rather than just winging it on his own, he'd be healthy and happy today.
This is similar to the problem with all illegal drugs. Heroin, when taken in pure form, is both cheap and relatively safe. Its negative health effects are mostly due to its impurity and the uncertainty over its dosage. People OD because they don't know the concentration they are buying. I'm not trying to promote heroin, but ordinary usage of pharmaceutical grade heroin is far less unhealthy than alcohol addiction, and far more compatible with normal functioning in society. But people don't want to hear this, the same way they don't want to hear that steroids are really quite safe and healthy when used properly. Athletes don't tend to use steriods properly, because they think more is better, and don't know how to cycle and cleanse, etc. And so we end up with sad stories like Caminiti's.
The problem with banning steroids and making them illegal is that we will guarantee their misuse, whereas making them legal but regulated is the only way to ensure their safe use. But people don't want that kind of compromise, they want to preach purity and promote death. This is how stupid some people are.
Without controls, you'll get more people like Ken Caminiti, who turned himself from a journeyman into an MVP in the middle of the 1996 season, and was dead by 2001.
Seriously? I thought it was the heroin, cocaine, painkiller abuse, and alcoholism that got him.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/11/entertainment/main648472.shtml
Seriously? I thought it was the heroin, cocaine, painkiller abuse, and alcoholism that got him.
Yes, but the steroids made him into an elite ballplayer. He used the resulting giant paychecks to buy the heroin, cocaine, painkillers and alcohol which killed him.
You should watch the "Real Sports w/ Bryant Gumbel" episode on steroids from 2005; I think it's on Google Video. Essentially, it argues that the risks of steroids are overblown, and that they can be used safely, in moderate doses. There have been no long-term epidemiological studies on steroid users, unlike the studies done on crack, cocaine, heroin, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. Seriously, of the illegal-drug using population, steroids, which most commonly are long-acting testosterone esters, are used by a tiny minority, so most people have little understanding of their effects. Plus there is testosterone replacement therapy, which is basically legal steroids for hypogonadal men. Also, steroids didn't cause Lyle Alzado's death; his brain cancer was a rare type most often found in AIDS patients.
Considering that an obese, inactive man (who is likely hypogonadal) is more likely to die than a guy who uses moderate doses of steroids to keep his bodyfat down, and excess bodyfat is the number one killer today.