Everybody immediately jumps to negative conclusions when a professional athlete is found guilty for anabolic steroid usage. Athlete’s who perform what people deem “too good to be true” are condemned of having used steroids to achieve their high marks. Despite the public opinion, the push to legalize steroids has several points worthy of consideration.

Barry Bonds before and after

First and foremost, is it not an athlete’s job to entertain his audience with new and sensational achievements? Is not the drive to succeed and excel as old as humankind itself? Why should steroids be banned if professional athlete’s feel tremendous pressure to secure an excellent salary by performing? Is it wrong athletes try to make it big through steroids when the chances of success are far greater than those of being caught? Besides, steroids are an athlete’s own choice, shouldn’t “his body, his choice” rule the day?

In addition, many of the effects of anabolic steroids have been played up by the media. Longtime researcher of “roid rage” Dr. Jack Darkes believes that the phenomena is little more than a placebo effect.¹ He suggests that the increased confrontational and risk-taking behavior of steroid users simply results from the fact that only more risk-taking individuals would take steroids in the first place and that professional athletes have naturally higher levels of testosterone to begin with. Reasoning or intellectual abilities are not decreased either. In fact, the National Center for Biotechnology Information reported that 70% of non-prescription steroid users have postgraduate degrees, far above the national average.² Lastly, physical affects such as shrunken testicles from excess steroid hormones being converted into estrogen and increased risk for cancer, although still present, are significantly lower in more modern steroids such as Primobolan. Effects such as balding only occur to male users with genetic predispositions.

Why the public sees steroids as fundamentally different from certain performance-aids accepted by society is also a mystery. Why are steroids seen as fundamentally different from powerful modern supplements such as Stemulite? Imagine baseball without a pair of contacts for players without perfect vision. Society as well as the media does not look down upon contacts; therefore they are legal.

Furthermore, the negative public image of steroids that is leading to the current condemnation of so many athletes has also limited funding and support for promising research on medical applications of steroids.³ Men have sexual organs removed as treatments for testicular cancer are already retaining their secondary sexual features better with the help of steroids. Anabolic steroids help leukemia victims regain muscle mass. Steroids are also promising in the fields of male oral contraceptives and boosting thymus T-cell production in HIV patients.⁴ Males with pituitary malfunctions are able to develop more normally with the help of anabolic steroids. People diagnosed with degenerative diseases are finding a reason to hope. As Jose Canseco himself poignantly put it in 2005, “Over the years I’ve been diagnosed with arthritis, scoliosis, degenerative disc disease, you name it. I truly believe I would be in a wheelchair today if steroids hadn’t been available to me. I need steroids and human growth hormone just to live”. Are we simply letting emotional comfort draft out what we perceive as moral fact? Is that acceptable when people could potentially be benefiting in the future if the media did not shed a single-sided view on steroids?

Would legalization of steroids promote the right sorts of things to society on a big-picture scale? Legalizing steroids would allow dangerous age and dosage levels to be avoided. Right now, 5% of American high school boys and 2% of American high school girls have used steroids at some time of their athletic career.⁵ Society’s current tactic of scaring people away from steroids by condemning them as solely evil is not working. Also, the legalization of steroids might give others the chance to compete within athletics. Many high school students stay out of athletics for their lack of natural physical ability. Steroids may give those students the opportunity to compete when they were not physically able to beforehand. For athletes, perhaps the already steroid-ridden playing field could be evened out. Furthermore, steroids do not give people the ability to go from zero to hero overnight, one still needs to train hard to activate the full effect of the steroids. Lastly, it’s rather well-known that the people in professional sports are often the ones with inherent genetic talent or the ones with the money to enlist the services of good coaching and join prestigious sports teams. Is it bad that steroids may help end this elitism in sports by evening out the playing field to encourage ‘athletic social mobility’? Is America not the land of opportunity?

However, the question ultimately comes down to where we draw the line for performance-enhancement. Once steroids are legalized and the playing field is evened, some athletes will undoubtedly take the next step in getting an advantage. Research on drugs that block myostatin, a protein that inhibits muscle growth, is already underway to seek a cure for muscular dystrophy and other degenerative diseases.⁶ If steroids were legalized, it would only be a matter of time before myostatin-blockers became proliferated. Perhaps it is best to draw the line at no questions asked, no performance-enhancements whatsoever. Besides, legalizing steroids could easily aggravate society’s current issue of teens unhappy with their body images developing mood disorders like body dysmorphic disorder.