There's Really NOTHING WRONG with USING Performance Enhancing Drugs

i kind of agree with the OP.

i mean... have we all seen the side effects of prescription drugs? this whole country is on blood pressure meds, pain meds, adderall, yadda yadda...

 

Im not advocating it, but a professional athlete is a grown man, already risking his health in the case of some sports like football, if he wants to take PEDs, who am I to stop him? Its his body.

 

Sure - and everyone would have to use them and destroy their long-term health to have a chance to be a professional athlete. If you don't care about the health of people, then sure, legalize it all. But I think we as a society think that's fairly stupid.

 

Thats another set of rules ddesigned on naive premises. PEDs, flopping, they're all methods to win that we deem impure because we bbelieve in the myth of fair play and the iintegrity of the game. Most players will do anything to win, why pretend otherwise?

Also, what makes ssome PEDs banned and others not? Why do wr just arbitrarily decide what a professional athlete can and cannot take?

 

I don't think we as a society think people should have to suffer heart damage and other such medical problems to play professional baseball.

Beyond that, if professional athletes are required to take them, then you'll have college athletes and high school athletes feeling the need to take them to get to that level. Those people are not grown men and certainly won't be educated about the risks they are taking.

 

Fair enough - why have any rules in sports? Why not allow anything-goes, since people will do anything to win?

 

Seriously. We're looking at a serious threat to the NFL as a franchise with the whole head thing because of what the NFL does to its players long-term. But now we're going to go around and then basically mandate ( and yes, mandate. Because those who don't want to take them will be forced to compete with those who do.) that NBA athletes should take drugs which have seriously potential to damage their mental stability.

Oh, and OP is continuing his 15-year old delusion of SCIENCE and PROGRESS. We don't have to worry about the side effects of drugs guys, because we've evolved and are so much better than the stupid people of yesterday!

Because sports are a game, genius. Games are supposed to be fair, and games will have their rules changed depending on what is the best way to make things fair. Heck, LA will always have an advantage over OKC in the salaries. Therefore we shouldn't bother to pretend that it's fair otherwise and abolish all CBA rules so that they can buy up all the good players.

 

Quite stupid to compare a regular job with being a pro athlete. The standards are completely different but you have to be able to kick a ball to know PED's will never be legal or accepted by any sporting body. Ofcourse, if you sit on your ass watching others as a fan with no first hand knowledge, you'll have a dif opinion.

 

I think it's about side effects - most notably effects that do damage to the body and long-term health.

Sports leagues have to sell their product to parents and kids. And Parents won't want to let their kids go watch athletes who are rewarded for doing things that have short term benefits but catastrophic long term health effects.

It's about health of kids, because athletes are the role models here - not anyone else.

 

Except it's not.

 

Nicotine and caffeine are both stimulants. Therefore, there is no difference health wise between smoking and drinking coffee.

 

The side effects of most of these are WAY overblown. I remember when Lyle Alzado died and blamed everything including brain cancer on the steroids he was taking. I was young and believed it at the time. In retrospect, I see that his beliefs had absolutely no basis in fact, but all the media ran with those claims unquestioningly.

The risk of the novel drugs that people start taking to avoid detection is much greater than old fashioned things that they started banning like straight up testosterone. The other major problem is with the dosage regimes that some of the athletes are on because they are having to do it "on the sly" and don't know any better.

The greatest harm reduction would occur if they required athletes to take the drugs under the care and supervision of league approved MD's. You wouldn't see people taking 10x too much or taking funky, new, unknown compounds. Concurrently, introduce permanent lifetime bans for anybody who does it outside the system.

They would still be doing PEDs exactly like they are doing now, they just would be doing them in a way that was much safer for the players.

 

quite stupid? i'd have to know how to kick a ball? sitting on my ass? what are you, 12?

 

Except then everyone would be doing them, instead of the small minority of athletes doing them now. All the speculation that "everyone does it" is just not supported by the evidence.

 

In sports the athletes who aren't using them are going to be at a disadvantage. This means taking them will be mandatory, probably leading to bigger and riskier ones being developed, leading to higher health risks. This is bad for sports in general.

In real life, go ahead and juice up, I really don't care.

 

Really. Is that the message you're going to send to high school and college athletes? That if they don't take steroids, they don't care about their sport?

I don't take Adderall. I don't smoke, heck I rarely drink coffee - I prefer tea, even though it has less caffeine. I could probably do my job better if I did any of those. Does that mean I don't care about my work?

Not to mention that we don't just do things because of their benefit to athletes, we do it in the interests of fairness to the game. Take the game of GMs assembling the best team. Athletes would benefit a lot from it if they could sign for as much as they wanted, or go to any city they pleased. So why don't we allow that?

 

Fine, it's "highly incompetent". The argument you and the OP try to make (although no one is getting past the first sentences in his posts) are only taken seriously by 12 year olds. PED's, any form of them, will never be legal in pro sports for obvious reasons. Let's make clones of every star athlete so they never have to miss time for injury. We all have dna matey, let's do it! Comparing them to real life situations show you don't understand what it's like to play a sport and have a highly unbalanced mentality from chronic masturbation.