However exagerated side effects may be, they are still detrimental. By allowing ball players to take steroids you will, in essence, force others to follow suit. Sure, in a sport like baseball being the biggest and strongest player doesn't lead to instant success, but let's look at the case of two young minor leaguers fresh out of high school. Their both projected to be marginal major leaguers. One of them takes steroids and the other, fearing the health side effects, does not. Which player do you think gets called up a few years down the road?

What young athletes have to give up in order to have even a chance at making it is bad enough already. Pretending we'll never have a hold on the problem in professional sports and allowing their use will be doing them a tremendous disservice.

If you allow steroid use with a doctors note you'll just create a cottage industry of doctors that will sign off on anything.

Test the athletes. Be strict. Be public.

As someone who supports the legalization of just about every drug under the sun (and as someone who's never used any of them), I do think that the union has to step aside here and allow testing to take place. It isn't hyperbole to say that the fate of baseball hangs in the balance: the last true connection fans have with the game is their trust in its integrity. We've been very forgiving of players in these days of enormous egos and bloated salaries, and quite frankly, baseball's enjoyed its little anti-trust exemption at our expense for a long time. It's time for some accountability, and in this case, it starts with the players. It's their bodies, their records, and their health, but it's our faith: if you expect us to come watch you play as athletes, you need to step up and tell us who's taking what. I'm not talking about just Bonds and Giambi: I'm talking about everyone.
Not to be the voice of corporate America, but this happens with unions all the time, and it always hurts them. They protect their own interests to their own detriment; it's like they would rather watch their industry go down the toilet than yield on principle. It happened with auto workers, steel manufacturers, and, most recently, IT jobs in Silicon Valley. The only thing that separates baseball players from these other industries is fan support. We've demonstrated an infallible desire to come back, again and again. Well, if they uncompromisingly stick to principle again, we may not come back. In which case, they would have cut off their nose to spite their face. Which is just plain dumb.

I think we need a heck of a lot more information (better researched articles) before we conclude anything about the health effects of steroids as used by athletes.

The linked articles talk about health risks in teh context of therapeutic uses of steroids. However, informal web articles I've read talk about doses of around, 20mg/day for therapeutic uses. In contrast, bodybuilders are said to use much more--more like 1000mg/week. And who knows how much a bodybuilder who abuses steroids uses.

Are these figures accurate? And if so, would baseball players come closer to bodybuilder type usage or to therapeutic doses? I have *no* idea. But that's what we need to find out, that's the sort of article/study we need to find.

Unfortunately, I don't give most newspapers much of a chance of coming up with this sort of article, so "civillians" will likely have to do the digging.

As long as "steroids" (a term that many people use to lump together a vast array of pharmaceutical products) are treated as unholy substances, you'll see no progress made in truly understanding their long-term effects. What's worse - a "cottage industry" of doctors who can be inspected, regulated and periodicaly cleaned up, or a vast black market with no controls whatsoever?

Steroid, THG and HGH use will continue in every professional sport, because the financial incentives are enormous and the fierce competition for a limited number of jobs will continue to place enormous pressure on marginal performers to produce or perish. We've tried zero-tolerance policies in every other aspect of the War on Drugs, and so far the results look to be a miserable failure. It's even worse with performance-enhancing substances, since unlike narcotics both the seller and the buyer can reap financial benefits from their use.

Why not "level the playing field" by making performance-enhancing substances voluntarily available to all, under a strictly enforced policy of medical controls, low dosage levels and rigorous testing? You'd be running risks, but far fewer than the ones you run now, with underground markets, uncontrolled usage cycling and endemic cheating on tests.

I LOVE KYLE BLACKNEY

KYLE IS GAY

Steroids shouldn't be used because there are more harmful effects than helpful ones.