From "A Philosophical Defense of Anabolic-Androgenic Steroid Use" by Sidney Gendin, Ph.D
IV - THE PROPAGANDA WAR
The fuss about Mark McGuire's use of androstenedione is particularly pathetic because androstenedione is probably worth less. In the first place, this so-called "drug" is not a drug according to the Food and Drug Administration but a naturally occurring hormone. It is readily available in health food stores and some supermarkets. Mr. McGuire did not sneak into ugly dope- saturated dungeons to buy his "drug". Androstenedione is marketed in hopelessly small units (50 or 100 mg) and consequently is cheaper than cashew nuts. The International Olympic Committee, now followed sheepishly by several other organizations, has banned androstenedione. The ban is arbitrary and capricious. (1) Arbitrary, because the IOC has not done the same with other supplements generally conceded to be much more effective than androstenedione. Creatine is the best example. (2) Capricious, because neither the IOC nor the others believes androstenedione gives the athlete who uses it any advantage. Their own tentative studies have led them to that conclusion. There you have it: a legally obtained over-the-counter substance is now banned by several sports federations who don't think it gives any advantage to those who use it. Here, then, is a clear-cut case of paternalism in action - you are deprived of a substance not because it is thought to give an undeserved advantage but because the banning gang is worrying about your health. Our "leaders" could simply send athletes notices that read: "WARNING! Current research suggests that androstenedione may be bad for your health and, in any case, probably won't improve your performance. Use at your own peril." (Last year, Javier Sotomayor, the world's number one high jumper was briefly banned for using cocaine. Obviously this was because he was considered a naughty boy. Nobody thought using cocaine helped him to jump higher. In fact, it probably made him worse.)
Steroid drugs could have somewhat similar notices: "WARNING! Although steroids may improve your performance, the dangers of taking them are well-established. Among these dangers are gynecomastia, liver diseases, cancer, baldness, severe acne, decreased sperm count, shrinking of the testicles, unbearable headaches, and undesirable voice changes." It might also mention the usual litany of side-effects that are found with every medicine including the contradictory ones meant to cover all bases such as insomnia and drowsiness, constipation and diarrhea. What else is new? Do we really need daily washings and scrubbings of our brain? There are, literally, dozens of steroids that athletes know about. They know which are injectable and which are taken orally. They know the possible and likely side effects of each. They know these things much better than 99% of all physicians for reasons to be explained shortly. We need a moratorium on brain washing just as we need one on control and power.
Athletes, no matter what their age, are treated disrespect fully because they too often act like children. Indeed, professional athletes readily accept contracts with clauses that bar them from criticizing officials even in the mildest manner and allow themselves to be fined for violating these clauses. In the past they permitted coaches to dictate the length and style of their hair. They are still told how to dress, especially when "on the road" for they swallow whole the unthinking presumption that they should be role-models - ostensibly for children but, in truth, for idolizing adults. Athletes may not fraternize with their opponents and baseball players may not bet on football games nor football players on baseball games. "Good reasons" are always given for these rigid rules but the fact remains that really good reasons work by the force of rationality. It is absurd that some person designated a "Commissioner" working at the behest of franchise owners is empowered to treat thirty-five year old men with families as children.
But athletes can be easily bullied only if they ARE what they are considered. Powerlifters, curiously enough, among the most easily bullied, now sign consent forms that go something like the following. (It is curious because, unlike professional athletes, they lose little by not surrendering to the bullies.) This particular example is found on all entry blanks of an organization called USA Powerlifting:"In consideration of the acceptance of my entry blank...I agree that any testing method which the director of this meet uses to detect the presence of strength-inducing drugs SHALL BE CONCLUSIVE. Whether I think the results of the tests are right or wrong, I agree I have no right to challenge the results...I agree to pay any attorney fee and litigation expenses incurred by any person whom I may sue in an effort to challenge this release from liability. "
I doubt that this bizarre consent form would withstand legal challenge but I doubt, too, that powerlifters will offer a challenge. Officialdom counts on this meekness and its consent forms will, in time, grow bolder.
Now it is true that not all adults are fully informed of the risks they run by using steroids, climbing mountains, and several other things. Our duty is to promulgate the risks but that is the extent of our duty and, more importantly, the extent of our right. We should not say, "This is no good for you, whether you understand or don't understand, and I/We won't permit it." This ugly way is a deep expression of arrogance but, worse, is born of a need to exult in power. There is great pleasure in telling people how to live their lives. As one who has spent most of his life exercising authority over students, I recognize, ironically, that it is a "drug". I struggle constantly to keep this vice in check. I personally have known members of important sports organizations who are fond of saying how overwhelming is the work they must do. They whine about how underappreciated they are but they will not quit. The work MUST be done. "Fine", I have replied, "I'll do it; go take a rest." They are wildly indignant. "You! Give up my post for you? It took me twenty years to reach this exalted position and you think I'd give it all up for a Johnny-come-lately like you? You must be crazy." Indeed, I must be, if I fail to understand how delicious it is to be in charge of other people's lives. The words of Lord Acton haunt the corridors of my mind whenever I hear these "good people" announce how heavy is the burden on their shoulders.
The National Institute of Drug Abuse (a division of the National Institutes of Health) is a particularly outrageous agent of propaganda. It puts out a series of childish, but very slick, glossy brochures called Mind Over Matter. The "heroine" of the series is a little girl named cutely "Sara Bellum". Get it? She's smart; you're not smart - at least not until she gets done with you. Nowhere in the series does the NIDA ever use the word "use". The implication is that if you have used drugs even once then you are an "abuser".
Inside her three feet by two feet brochure, Little Miss Bellum explains to "girls" and "guys" why it is better to do pushups than to abuse drugs. Nowhere does the good Sara ever use the words "men" or "women". She wants to be a regular guy, just like you and me. She wants to get "down to your level" so you'll be able to understand her and also know she is being straight and honest with you. Sara has other brochures, too, in which she has plenty to say against marijuana, opiates, drinking, you name it. No doubt NIH is working on other brochures featuring an army officer, Sir Ebrum, who will point out that hard studying before exams beats cheating and who concludes each of his brochures with that wise, old proverb, "Cheaters always lose". It isn't as if all this is wrong; rather it is awful drivel, so insulting that only persons crushed by power or in the habit of bowing to authority would not recognize it as such.
It is important to say why neither steroids nor marijuana are in any way comparable to cocaine or heroin. The use of heroin or cocaine should not be legal but the other two should be. Steroids and marijuana are neither habituating nor addictive. The distinction between habit and addiction is often missed, even by so-called "health professionals". A habit is a settled learned tendency to act in a certain way. "Habit" is a neutral term that does not give a clue as to whether the tendency is good or bad. Brushing one's teeth is for most people habitual, and a good thing, too, but it is not an addiction. Whereas a habit is a settled disposition to behave a certain way, an addiction is a physical dependency to a substance. Furthermore, we never use the term "addiction" neutrally but to condemn, and this is how it should be.
Bad habits are maintained because, although it isn't clear to those who don't have them, they are immensely pleasurable. In habits, unlike addictions, it is the doing, rather than some end result, that is the attraction. Cigarette smokers enjoy the inhaling, the very lighting of the cigarette, even drawing the cigarette out of the pack. All these are elements of the pleasurable habit. What is "craved" is the very doing, the smoking and not the nicotine. (Prior to 1819, nicotine was not known so people could not have craved it yet they craved smoking.)
Addictions are different. A person who injects heroin into his veins does this too infrequently to acquire a habit. He probably does this no more than once daily. Some addicts do it no more often than three or four times per week. The addict is not interested in the action of injection. He is after the experience the heroin delivers. If he could accomplish the same end-state by rubbing heroin into his skin that would satisfy him. If injecting were his goal he would take injections throughout the day even if he had nothing inside the syringe. I have never heard of a person who was habituated to injections. When we say heroin addicts "crave" heroin, we mean they crave the effects the heroin produces. When we say the heroin addict is addicted what we mean is that he is chemically dependent on heroin and suffers terribly if deprived of it. Physical agony is the nature of addiction, not habituation.
Cigarette smoking is principally a very bad habit (although, possibly nicotine is addictive, even though, as I said above, it is never craved). The AMA and FDA and their allies in the "war" against smoking prefer the term "addiction" to describe the cigarette habit because "habit" is a neutral term and the propaganda war demands condemnation. Cigarette smokers rarely experience horrible withdrawal symptoms requiring hospitalization when they try to stop, but they do suffer considerable psychological distress. It is, surprising perhaps, how much harder it is to break a habit than to break from an addiction. An addict can be put into special surroundings to "dry out" and be made "clean". This can be accomplished sometimes in only a week or two. If he is lucky, as few addicts are, and the environment to which he re turns is very favorable to normal life, he will stay "off" drugs without battling cravings. The cigarette smoker who "goes clean" (say five years without a cigarette) may remain in danger of falling back and must ever be on guard. One puff and he may regress to his old ways. Alcohol use seems to be both habitual and addictive. In the early stages of withdrawal, the alcoholic suffers a great deal of physical torment. Much later - say, after five years - the addiction is gone but the habit still lurks in the background. The alcoholic faces temptation even then, and is always in danger of falling back. But the important point is that this is so because although the addiction is broken, the habit remains buried in those neural pathways.
Now marijuana smoking is a recreational activity and the use of heroin, crack and cocaine are not. The typical social setting for marijuana use is at a party. Conceivably heroin and cocaine are recreational at the beginning of their use but not after the addiction is present. At that point, the heroin user seeks relief, not pleasure. Its use is now a very grim business. If marijuana were legal it would not be consumed with the frequency that cigarettes are because its effects are so strong that even the Department of Health and Human Services concedes that people don't need to smoke it with the frequency that they consume cigarettes to achieve the desired effects. ("Marijuana and the Cannabinoids", 1991 Third Triennual Report to Congress from the Secretary.) As with all other things, diminished frequency, diminished habituation. As it now stands, with the exception of some persons living in Jamaica, I have never heard of someone habituated to marijuana. But suppose I am wrong. A habit that is so underground, so immune to observation, that I know of no cases is hardly worth our bothering with. What matters most about marijuana is that it does not turn people into dysfunction al beings. They get up and go to work just as cigarette smokers do. About 19.4 million Americans are recreational users according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Marijuana users blend in with the "normal" population invisibly.
What the propagandists tell us is that marijuana is a gateway to harder drugs. This claim is dishonest, not merely wrong. The propagandists claim that most persons who use the hard drugs begin with marijuana. That is the extent of the gateway. The claim may be true, but what of it? What needs to be proved for the "gateway" argument is that all or most persons who use marijuana recreationally end up using the hard drugs. Since everyone knows this is false, the "gateway" argument is dishonest. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration estimates that 19.4 million Americans occasionally use marijuana and 4.2 million use cocaine. Perhaps 180,000 persons use heroin. One might as well say that buying an airline ticket is a gateway to death since nearly all people who die in airplane crashes bought air line tickets shortly before they died. Obviously the objection to buying airline tickets would have to depend on the "fact" (which it isn't) that nearly all persons who buy airline tickets die in airplane crashes. Since the argument against the use of marijuana is exactly parallel to the argument against buying airline tickets we must conclude that the propagandists are dishonest, not merely wrong. They count on the fact that people will not notice the parallel. Indeed, many people do not.
The use of marijuana does not cause dysfunctionality but the use of heroin and cocaine does (and so do hallucinogens like LSD and PCP, inhalants like amyl and butyl nitrates, sedatives such as barbiturates and methaqualone and tranquilizers of various sorts). Conjointly, these result in about 485,000 emergency admittances to hospitals in a single year. That makes these drugs a concern for public health. Every steroid user would have to be admitted five times per year to match this horror. Heroin and cocaine users are a drain on social resources. More over, this destructiveness is further complicated by the desperate measures heroin and cocaine addicts take to get hold of drugs. They will kill and rob their own family members. They are immediate threats to society, not merely to themselves. That is why objecting to them is not compromising my argument against paternalism. There is no serious analogy between marijuana use and heroin use. There is even less analogy between steroid use and heroin use. Steroids are not even mildly habituating. Typical steroid users "cycle" their steroids. For example, one might use one's favorite steroid for three weeks and then "go off" for two weeks. No cigarette smoker or heroin addict can adopt such a routine. Steroid users sometimes find their source has "dried up", in which case they simply are obliged to stop. End of story. No mad shakes, no terrible cramps, no bizarre hallucinatory episodes culminating in emergency room admissions, nothing other than some loss of muscular mass and a lot of psychological misery. If the user runs out of money he does not wait desperately in dark allies to attack rich, little old la dies. He is done. End of story.
Typically, the steroid user may be injecting only once per week (it all depends on the particular steroid) and this can hardly qualify as a habit. There really is nothing to debate despite what "medical authorities" say to the contrary. If any "authority" says otherwise, ask him to compare the habituating or addicting properties of Deca-Durabolin with Anavar. Or how about Dianabol, Nolvadex, Equipoise, Cytomel, Anadrol®, Clomid, Halotestin, Cyclofenil, or any of another couple dozen steroids he has never heard of? Will he know which are taken orally, which via injection? Will he be able say how many times one can "abuse" this drug or that drug before acquiring a habit? In short, does he know anything? It is very unlikely he will know a fraction as much as several steroid "gurus" who willingly share their knowledge via Internet.