Testosterone-Fueled Panic
Another good read on how OTHER People view steroids...RTB
The cry-wolf effect may have as much to do with the boom in steroid use as anything else. Athletes were inclined to be skeptical of warnings about steroids because their own experience contradicted what critics were saying. When use of Dianabol and other anabolics began to surge in the 1960s and '70s, opponents decried them as ineffective. The message was: They don't work, so don't take the risk. But steroids did work, and users knew it. Once weightlifters, bodybuilders, and other athletes realized they were being lied to about the efficacy of steroids, they were less likely to believe warnings about health hazards, especially when the evidence backing them up was vague or anecdotal.
One of the chief drumbeaters for the steroids-don't-work movement was Bob Goldman, author of the hysterical anti-steroids polemic Death in the Locker Room. Goldman, a former competitive power-lifter turned physician and sports medicine specialist, was an early, and shrill, critic of performance pharmacology. In his 1984 expose, Goldman attributes steroids' tissue-building qualities almost entirely to the placebo effect. His agenda may have been morally sound, but his conclusions ran counter to the preponderance of scientific evidence at the time. Today, his claims are even less supportable. Goldman is working on a new edition of the book, one that he says will better crystallize current scientific thought on the subject. Of his 1984 edition and its seeming histrionics, Goldman says the book was intended "as an educational tool to warn high school students of the possible hazards of drug use, but then it became something else."
Whatever his intentions at the time, Goldman's views played well in the media, which cast the book as a sobering empirical assault on performance-enhancing drugs. Its warnings soon gained traction with lawmakers. Although the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 had already made it illegal to dispense steroids for nonmedical reasons, Congress, ostensibly out of concern over reports of increasing steroid use among high school athletes, revisited the matter in 1989.
Congressional hearings convened to determine whether steroids should become the first hormone placed on Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act, reserved for drugs with substantial abuse potential. Such legislation, if passed, would make possession of anabolic steroids without a prescription a federal offense punishable by up to a year in prison. Distributing steroids for use, already prohibited by the 1988 law, would be a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. What's usually forgotten about these hearings, or perhaps simply ignored, is the zeal with which many regulatory agencies, research organizations, and professional groups objected to the proposed changes.
The American Medical Association (AMA), the FDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and even the Drug Enforcement Administration all opposed the reclassification. Particularly adamant was the AMA, whose spokespersons argued that steroid users did not exhibit the physical or psychological dependence necessary to justify a change in policy.
Nevertheless, Congress voted into law the 1990 Anabolic Steroids Control Act, which reclassified steroids as Schedule III controlled substances, placing them on legal par with barbiturates and narcotic painkillers such as Vicodin, just one step down from amphetamines, cocaine, and morphine. Now even first-time steroid users faced possible jail time.
