Writers on Steroids?
- Thread starter Barbara R.
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Sure it does. My argument is that there is a double standard: artists can attribute a performance to illegal drugs and its ok, but athletes can't.
That makes no sense?
Can this be done legally without a medical condition that renders the treatment necessary?
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Currently no, unfortunately. If I remember correctly, steroids are now a Schedule II drug which makes possessing and using them illegal. Nevertheless, I know some guys who do take them and get their blood work monitored by a lab and doctors they know.
Obviously, if you look at how many baseball players, football players, and other athletes have been pinched by the law recently, they've been doing something and it ain't Wheaties.
The whole thing is really a joke. All the medical literature I've read and the, yes, anecdotal evidence I've seen/heard suggests that steroids, if used responsibly, will help get you bigger and stronger, assuming you eat well and train hard. As I said before, there will be side effects, but as a 'guru' once posited, which is more likely to kill you: a bottle of aspirin, a bottle of steroid pills, or a hit off a crack pipe? I think we all know the answer to that one
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Well, athletes can attribute a performance to illegal drugs. It's just that the audience refuses to accept that performance as valid.
It partly goes back to my previous point--in a lot of forms of art, the final product is all the audience cares about, so they don't care how the artist produced it.
In sports, the performance is often seen as almost as important as the outcome. The team that loses might get a standing ovation for fighting so hard and making it such a great game to watch. The runners who didn't get a medal are still praised, with genuine respect, for their performances.
But I think the real problem is the audience hates finding out they've been manipulated--that they've invested emotion in what they thought was a spectacular triumph when it was really an engineered outcome.
If a singer belts out a virtuoso performance, then is revealed to have been lip-syncing, the audience feels outraged. If a dancer's spectacular leap is revealed to have been assisted by a hidden springboard, the audience who gasped to see it will now be disgruntled at having been fooled.
And the runner who breaks a world record in spectacular fashion, then turns out to have been doping when none of the other competitors were, leaves his or her fans feeling they've been victim of a con artist.
Painters or writers are judged by different criteria, because their process is not a spectator sport that causes an audience to get emotionally invested. The audience only gets emotionally invested in the final product, so there's less snobbery and judgment about how the art got made in the first place. It's seen as a private matter, where public performances are not.
Everyone please realize that this refers to only one class of medicinal steroids--the anabolic steroids. The corticosteroids (including cortisone, prednisone, hydrocortisone, and others) are not illegal nor do they possess muscle-building abilities. They have anti-inflammatory and immune-suppressing actions, and are used to treat asthma, some forms of arthritis, autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis, skin rashes like eczema, and allergies among other things. These corticosteroids are available via prescription and in some over-the-counter medications. People taking these medications are not going to get all muscle-bound, even if they have vigorous exercise regimes.
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Good point for clarification purposes. I WAS referring to the muscle-building anabolic steroids in my previous posts, not the catabolic ones as listed above.
Stuff like cortisone, prednisone, et. al. are not illegal and should never be considered muscle-building drugs at all.
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