Fiscally nuts. Socially insane.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Not-So-Illegal Steroids

Read all about it.

Former Senator George Mitchell's campaign against steroids is coming to a close later today, as he plans on announcing the names of over sixty illegal steroid users in Major League Baseball. Supposedly, the list includes names of the biggest stars, MVPs, and so on.

I still haven't figured out why steroids are illegal on the federal level, though. Hold on, I know what you're thinking. I'm just saying, why can't we let the private institutions, in this case the MLB, take care of it? Steroids are basically illegal at this point for health reasons. I just don't understand why the government doesn't let people mess themselves up if they want to. (hey, it's your choice, good luck with the acne and tiny ding dong)

Private organizations should be able to ban whatever they want, and in baseball and other professional sports I think that is more than necessary, don't get me wrong. But to say the government should all-out ban a steroid? That's not right.

UPDATE: Read the full report here.

3 comments:

billspaced said...

I totally agree. Furthermore, the only way to "level" the playing field is to say that nothing is cheating.

For if one guy chooses to cheat, and isn't caught, he's got a leg up on everybody else.

If he's caught, he took his chances and will pay his price.

But it leaves those ethical guys at a disadvantage.

They might not cheat, but if steroids were legal, they wouldn't be cheating, and they then might choose to use them.

Surely, there will always be people who wouldn't use, but the reasons they didn't use would change. In other words, the motivations for doing and not doing something would change.

For the better.

I also agree with your stance on the government (I'd add, at all levels) not getting involved. Private enterprises should be able to ban certain things (smoking, for example, for hospital employees), but the government should keep its nose out of this.

The government only needs to get involved if there's a national need to do so (like prohibiting the use of used needles, for example).

Troy Camplin said...

I guess the initial idea was to prevent cheating. BUt if everyone's doing it, then who's cheating? Now you're just keeping up.

Anonymous said...

If baseball is to be viewed as a business providing entertainment, should the movie industry ban implants and plastic surgery to prevent actresses from artificially improving their ability to entertain us?

We know those botox lovin', collagen injectin' and silicone supplementers ain't doin' it to impress their girlfriends. It's to get the part, get the lead role and get on screen to... entertain us. No different than baseball players getting juiced to hit more home runs. Provides us with more entertainment.