If you're old enough to drink alcohol, by all ethical measures, you're old enough to do steroids.
We begin:
Steroids are an ergogenic aid. Countless ergogenic aids exist both legal and illegal. If the ergogenic aid is in fact illegal, there needs to be justification why that is.
The justification for steroids to be illegal are as follows; it's unfair, it presents undue risk for harm, it's unnatural, it contravenes the spirit of the sport, and coerces others who would not otherwise use steroids.
So we begin... As I said, steroids are in the classification of ergogenic aids. By definition, an ergogenic aid is anything that increases work or is work producing.
Ergogenic aids fall into three classifications; physiological, psychological, and mechanical. An athlete's performance and capability in a sport is drastically affected by each of these. Psychological involves the manipulation of the mind. Hypnosis, positive self talk, mental rehearsal, etc. In sport, hypnosis is generally banned while the others are legal. Mechanical ergogenic aids include technique and equipment. Basically the mechanics of the activity and technology of everything you use. Lighter shoes, a fiberglass vaulting pole, an aluminum baseball bat, etc. Some legal, some banned. Steroids fall under the classification of physiological ergogenic aids. As does creatine, vitamins, water, caffeine, and plenty more. Genetics included.
All performance in any athletic field is composed of the integration of these three classifications. Steroids increases the physiological aspect. Now we'll individually assess every reason given for why steroids should be illegal.
Social coercion and undue risk for harm:
Think football. America loves football and praises the players. The amount of social propaganda in the sport of football is absolutely staggering. It's fine if you're the world's biggest football fan. That's not the argument. The argument is the fact that this "undue risk for harm" caused by athletes being "coerced" into steroid use is in no way a valid issue. At the end of each NFL player's career, virtually every player to date suffers from spinal compression. Each season, every player has somewhere in the range of an 80% chance of injury, which makes the average NFL career only 4½ years long. Even outside of the NFL, look into younger boy's football. There's almost 50,000 surgical procedures per year now from football. Every year. It's the sport that's killing the athletes, not drugs. How many steroid related injuries has there in football? Eleven? Eight? Whatever the number is of players during the history of the sport that have massively abused them. Certainly not 50,000 annually. Don't blame steroids, blame the sport.
And the issue of coercion is an unspeakably pointless argument anyway, considering nobody forces you to compete at a level that requires the use of steroids. Steroids are a part of that level of play, and you have absolutely no obligation to participate in it. It's exactly like saying "I want to play in the NFL but I don't want people to hit me very hard." It's a part of the game and there's safety risks associated. You can participate if you'd like to, but there's absolutely no obligation.
And when you consider undue risk for harm, you're going to be hurt in football, there's no question about that. Every player gets hurt. That's not considered an undue risk. Let's say there's a 1% chance you'll develop liver cancer and a 90% chance you'll sign a multi million dollar contract as a professional athlete if you supplement your football career with steroids. Can you honestly trick yourself into believing that this is an undue risk? In football alone, you will get hurt for nothing, and that's not an undue risk, but with steroids where you have a 1% risk for side effects, and 90% chance of being a millionaire, this is the undue risk that's so popular in the media. I actually find this hysterical.
Further comedy on the undue risk argument is as follows: realize that alcohol exists and is heavily consumed. There's unavoidable brain damage to the new cortex in the human brain every time alcohol enters the body. It's inevitable. Not a lot of controversy there. But with steroids, the side effects are not inevitable, however, and unlike alcohol, there is the possibility of vast rewards, both physical and financial. By definition, this is not "undue."
Considering now that there's no undue risk for harm, it becomes the advantages of steroid use that in fact create the controversy. What it comes down to is a value judgment for the individual. It's the athlete's decision if they want to compete at that level, and that's it. Nobody else's. Social coercion is effectively an excuse middle-aged-once-upon-a-time-high-school-star-athletes routinely use to discredit their own ability limits and justify why other people make millions, and they do not. It holds no resemblance to the reality of the cost-benefit analysis each athlete goes through. I went through it too. I decided not to compete at the level that required steroids. I however, am fine with that. I would actually be hugely embarrassed to try to blame social coercion and other steroid issues on why I didn't end up on TV.
Next argument against steroids: it's unfair.
"When an athlete takes steroids, he/she is given an extra edge in competition. This is in no way fair to the others." That is essentially the argument here. Sentence one is definitively true, and sentence two holds a small amount of truth. What is in fact true of sentence two is credited only to laws banning the use of steroids however. The only way to make steroid use unfair, is if strictly specific people had access to it. If only a select group of people could obtain the benefits of steroid use and others could not, yes, it would be unfair. Aside from laws, nothing could cause this.
You know what routinely gives a real unfair advantage though? Better equipment, better food, better shoes, better coaching. The list goes on and on and it's basically summarized by one word: money. All of these things money gives us are both legal and morally acceptable. It's what you're born into that gives an unfair advantage. Whether you're born into a wealthy family with the money to afford NBA coaches and the most advanced equipment and facilities since birth, or if you're a poor kid who has to walk six miles to the basketball court every day and play barefoot with rocks. The sport doesn't care. The sport only cares if the ball goes in the hoop. How is this fair? How about the genetic lottery? It doesn't matter how hard you try, someone with a better genetic foundation for the sport can easily be better with no work at all. Is that fair? That's all morally acceptable, ethical, legal, and even celebrated. Steroids are available to all those who choose to use them. Professional private coaching, better equipment, and incredible genetics are not. Again, it is a value judgment for the athlete alone regarding the use of steroids. This does not influence the fairness of play nearly to the same degree of hundreds of other celebrated factors. Thus, the unfairness argument in no way exceeds the status of being a biased statement with no factual support.
Fourth argument against steroids: it contravenes the spirit of the sport.
In this argument, if we were to eliminate doping, we would have the sport in it's purest form. The athletes would then compete against each other as they should. This argument usually alludes to the ancient Olympics in an image of perfection. A paragon of virtue, ethics and morality. What's hilarious here, however, is that it was never clean. Just because deca or d-bol didn't exist back then doesn't mean the athletes didn't consume every possible substance that did. They swallowed every little herb or potion they thought could give them the slightest advantage. So throughout all human history, sports have never been clean.
Furthermore, even in the case that all sports were free of steroids, there's nothing inherently valuable about them. Sports come and go. They're made up through human intervention, and stick around as long as they're a valued source of entertainment. I'm telling you right now, the Olympics would be more entertaining if every world record was shattered every time you watched it. Sports are just a human creation for sake of entertainment, nothing more. When they're no longer entertaining, they cease to exist. Plenty of sports used to be worldly popular and no longer exist. There's absolutely no way anything can possibly contravene the "spirit of a sport." Even if there was, regulatory rules change all the time, that doesn't contravene the spirit? The sport is completely changed. Strike zone, shot clock, changing the construction of the javelin, adding pads to football. If the spirit of sport existed, that would contravene it first.
Argument five: steroids are unnatural.
"Steroids are not natural, and therefore should not be a part of athletics." I understand the logic here. And by the exact same logic, sports are not natural, and therefore should not be a part of athletics either. The definition of sport is a set of movements in a specified time and place, aimed at producing a winner. It's a completely unnatural sociocultural artifact that, as you remember, was created only by human intervention. Sports do not exist naturally. There's nothing natural about them and in addition, nothing natural about how we train for them. Athletes transform themselves into the embodiment of a particular sport. Regardless of their natural body type, they manufacture it through rigorous training in completely unnatural ways to increase their capability to perform a series of unnatural movements. You understand that the entirety of all of it is overwhelmingly unnatural right?
Although I feel I have already contradicted the unnatural-argument, consider that there are countless unnatural substances that are completely legal in sports, and there are plenty of natural substances that are strictly banned. Moral issues have no relevance to whether or not it's natural or unnatural. Polymerized glucose is totally unnatural. It's made under specific conditions in a laboratory. Testosterone is 100% natural. Polymerized glucose is legal with no restrictions, testosterone is illegal and banned in every sport. The fact that polymerized glucose is unnatural has no relevance to anything, and likewise, the fact that testosterone is totally natural is also completely pointless. Therefore, the argument of steroids being an unnatural substance is entirely invalid. There's no truth to it, and even if there was, it doesn't matter because the sports aren't natural either.
What have we learned?
The coercion argument is garbage, the argument for undue risk is garbage, the accusations of it being unfair is garbage, the idea that it could contravene the spirit of sport is garbage, and the argument that it is unnatural is garbage.
There is no morally relevant criteria for explaining why steroids are illegal, or distinguishing why some ergogenic aids are accepted, and others banned. If you can tell me one, please do- because none exist. There is no argument against steroid use that is systematically consistent or impartial. Decisions are made by personal situations fueling personal agendas. What constitutes right or wrong is not what is proper, but rather what is most beneficial to the decision maker. And the fact that they're a banned substance is actually hysterical. It means that there's countless uneducated people running the world of sports. More power to them though I guess- and they need all the power they can get considering they haven't figured out how to stop anybody from "breaking the law" to use them. It's all fantastically ridiculous.
Question: I understand that there isn't necessarily a valid reason why they're illegal. - but this doesn't mean that anything positive would come out of legalizing them.
Answer: The answer to your "question" is yes, the amount of "anything positive" that would occur as a direct result of their legalization is almost endless. The only real concerns associated with steroids are kids and dealers. If certain steroids were made legal and all taxes on them forwarded to drug education and prevention, there is virtually no end to the positive change that would occur from the children on up to the dealers. Does that make sense? It would remedy every tangible complication in the most thorough way the human race is capable of- second only to destroying all steroids and the knowledge on how to make them. This scenario would, however, offer somewhat of a crisis in the medical field when steroids are needed for a patient. So as far as the cost benefit analysis goes, legalizing them to adults to fund education and prevention plans for kids is the best possible solution to every problem remotely associated.
Question: I'm still against steroids.
Answer: Wow. Wow for two reasons. One, that was, again, nowhere near a question format, and two, how? How are you still against steroids? Just the fact that genetics exist should totally change your opinion. If someone is born with horrible genes, and another with the genetics to succeed without effort, I don't understand why you can't at least attempt to minimally compensate for an unfair genetic disadvantage.
Even outside of genetics, it's totally justified. Let me set up a scenario for you. We have two competitive bicyclists- one rich- one moderately not rich at all. The rich guy rides a Lotus superlight technology advanced bicycle that costs a fortune, has had olympic cycling coaches since he was six, and takes every legal supplement that exists- fish oil, creatine, vitamins, every amino acid, and so on. The not-rich-much guy can afford a 10-speed Huffy and a 6 week cycle of cheap steroids. That's what's going to give him the most out of his money. Even if the two guys train identically, if the poor guy even gives the rich guy a run for his money in competition, he has "an unfair advantage" and "he's a cheater" and so on. Everyone ridicules him. And so would you. You totally would. If you read through the whole steroid article and didn't grasp why it's ridiculous to ban them, you're that type of person. Now let me explain the exact reason why you're that type of person.
You think that the people who use steroids are getting something for nothing. That's what you think. You think that they're getting the benefits without putting in their dues. They skipped the whole work ethic part and moved right into the glory of it all. It's okay to think this- most people do. Understand that it's wrong though. Your thinking is. The people who took steroids and it got them somewhere, statistically the chances are they worked harder than those who didn't. These people assessed the cost-benefit analysis and were willing to do virtually anything to excel. They put in their dues. They trained as hard as they could, ate perfect, focussed on nothing but excelling at their sport, and were even willing to risk side effects to achieve their goals. There's no free ride for these people. The odds are that they worked harder than the clean athlete who didn't have the motivation to go to literally any length anything to succeed. And this is fine. Nobody has to go to that level and succeed. But those who do: there's no logical reason why we should all be mad at them.
And if you're still holding strong to your anti-steroid position, I'm okay with that. However, if this is you, just simply admit that you're favoring the side of the argument with no logic to it. As long as you're willing to admit that, I'm totally fine with you being against steroids. Oh, also though: you can't try to argue against steroids to anyone as long as you live. Being as you understand that there's no validity to support this argument, you would either be lying or being purposefully misleading in your words. This isn't ethical, so don't do it. What you can do is sit quietly with your bizarrely biased opinion, and keep it to yourself. And God bless you for being horrifically stubborn.
A lot of the arguments made here were based on old arguments presented by Peter Harmer, Ph.D.
Plus, this isn't just me justifying use, as I have drug testing records to prove a lifetime of steroid-free lifting.