This is especially true if, as has been suggested (Staudohar 2005), that despite stricter testing procedures, professional athletes still use anabolic steroids and human growth hormone in large numbers that greatly exceed those acknowledged or caught by their respective league governing bodies.
By process of elimination, it would appear that the primary impetus for anti- steroid regulations in professional sports is public perception, and that favorable public relations and maintenance of the highest revenue from sponsors is more of a factor than concern for the health of the athlete or honest competition. If anything, steroid use contributes to the highest level of play by the fastest, largest, and strongest athletes who hit balls further and throw them harder than their non-pharmaceutically enhanced counterparts.
Conclusion:
On first glance, pharmaceutical performance enhancement in professional sports may seem to be unfair competition. However, when one considers the evolution of modern sports training and the degree to which chemical technology contributes to other aspects of sports medicine, nutrition, and training, the distinction between fair and unfair, or acceptable and unacceptable becomes less clear. The modern understanding of responsible (i.e. medically supervised) steroid use suggests that their use is actually less dangerous than myriad other autonomous choices of lifestyle and habit made by millions of American adults every day and, in light of current knowledge, no more extreme than other aspects of high-level professional athletic training, willing sacrifice, and lifestyle.
Strictly controlling steroids and preventing their use for non-medical reasons by females and minors is logically justified by the consequences of their use in those groups; likewise, amateur sports bans of performance enhancing drugs is appropriate given the comparable regulation of amateur sports in other respects. Medically unsupervised use of any controlled substance is no more permissible for professional athletes than for other citizens.
Otherwise, adults are capable of making autonomous decisions, whether that entails skydiving, riding motorcycles...
Professional athletes are not role models of their own choosing, and pharmaceutical supplementation would not be unfair competition if medically supervised steroid administration were universally available.
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