Performance-Enhancing Drugs are Fine by Me

Published October 16, 2007

By Henry Melcher

In the Friday, October 5th New York Times crossword puzzle, “Steroids” is the answer to the “4 down” prompt: “Some athletes shoot them.”

But let us not refer to performance enhancing drugs as “steroids.” Steroids is such an ugly word, evocative of defunct WWE wrestlers like “X-Pac,” Under Armour commercials, rampant backne and shriveled testicles.

Instead, let us think of performance enhancing drugs in the same light as coffee. And while likening a single shot of Human Growth Hormone to a shot of espresso might require a bathtub’s worth of highly concentrated caffeine for an accurately proportionate comparison, please consider the following: whether an espresso or cup of coffee is consumed in the morning for practical, digestive purposes, at lunch-time to push through your afternoon classes, or after dinner to enjoy a light yet nevertheless alluring buzz, one as lambent as the setting sun, caffeine, a drug, may well enhance your enjoyment of or performance on any given day.

Where most take issue with performance enhancing drugs use is that they violates contemporary American law. To
those concerned with such standards I would reference the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. While touring one of his ocean-side abodes at age 15, I could not help but notice the home’s framed pictures of poppy plants and a display case replete with elaborately wrought porcelain pipes. Like the Irish Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats, Neruda’s use of opium and other (performance enhancing) drugs is well documented. Though Neruda utilized illegal substances to tap into a higher plane of inspiration, the literati do not place an asterisk on any of his volumes, nor do they celebrate his choices of indulgence-instead, his work is celebrated for the creative heights it reached.

Barry Bonds‘ 756th homerun ball, now a possession of fashion designer Marc Ecko, who purchased it for almost one million dollars (one could have also voted to launch it into outer-space as a complete renouncement of Bonds’ paramount accomplishment), will enter the Baseball Hall of Fame with an asterisk on it. Whether or not Bonds’ BALCO (Burlingame Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative) rumors prove legitimate in years to come, the asterisk on his ball will always signify “awesomeness” to me before it will the questionable means he used to accomplish the feat. Did you not experience gleeful piloerection as you watched Mark McGuire’s line drive clear the left field fence for his sixty-second homerun in 1998? And did you not glean a sublime sense of transcendence from the absurdity of Barry Bonds’ seventy-three homeruns in 2001?

Both of these events, like a well-made cup of coffee, lent enjoyment to and enhanced my day.

So while you won’t catch me slapping my calves for a vein before an ultimate frisbee game, in the world of professional sports, I cannot object to performance enhancing drugs. The time of purity in this country has passed, and as evidenced in the NY Times crossword, the use of performance enhancing drugs has crept its way into normative behavior. If crotch-rocket motorcycles now boast proportional powers of acceleration beyond some jets engines, and a pair of artificially enhanced breasts might gain an “upcoming actress… access” (as Kanye West purports and popular media confirms), to me, accepting athletes who may or may not partake in the occasional super-charged “protein” shake does not seem an outlandish standard to accept.

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