Steroids became an option to athletes in the Olympics and other major sporting events during the 1950’s. But this use of steroids among athletes only became widely apparent when Canadian sprint runner Ben Johnson tested positive for steroid use after winning the gold medal for the one hundred-meter dash during the 1988 Olympics (Francis, 45). Now a skinny fifteen-year-old can just walk down to the local gym and find people who either sell or know how to get in contact with those who sell the drug that will make him envious of his friends. Steroids are an attractive drug. While steroids seem harmless to the unaware user, they can have a risky effect. Most of the time whether the users are new or experienced, they do not know the dangerous consequences steroids can have on their bodies and their minds. Though steroids cause a relatively insignificant number of deaths in our society, the banning of steroids is justified because steroids have a lot of side effects not known to the uninformed user.
In the 1930’s, steroids were known to be used for homosexuals to lower there testosterone. In the past few decades, steroids have been found mostly in college, the Olympics, and in professional sports. But today, steroids are being found in middle and high schools. Most commonly, steroids have been found in athletes involved in sports that rely on strength and size, like football, wrestling, or baseball, in endurance athletes where athletes are involved in track-and-field and swimming, in athletes involved in weight training or bodybuilding, and in anyone interested in building and defining...
Anabolic steroids, when combined with vigorous physical training, do enhance athletic performance by making users bigger, stronger, and faster—while also speeding up their recovery time after strenuous exercise. If steroids effectively enhance performance, what is wrong with allowing athletes to take advantage of modern medicine and pharmacology? After all, athletes frequently are given painkillers and are fitted with artificial devices designed to enable continued participation in a sport despite injury. (Mitten par.6)
In the 1950's, synthetic steriods became popular with athletes because they helped produce this greater-than-normal muscle size and strength, but the abuse of these synthetic steriods has many dangerous physical and psychological effects.Steriods are fast catching up with antibiotics as the most abused class of drugs prescribed by doctors even though they cannot cure one single condition. All steriods can do is supress the bodies ability to express a normal response. Sometimes suppression will give the body a chance to heal itself, but more often causes permanent damage. Doctors, by law, cannot prescribe anabolic steriods for the purpose of athletic enhancement, and possession of t...
However, many question what exactly is the makeup of steroids and what effects steroids could potentially have on our human bodies that athletes everywhere have either experimented with or are currently using in their everyday workout regimes. First, steroids are a group of compounded substances “that mimic the effects of the natural male hormone testosterone.” (Agullo-Calatayud) Steroids have a chemical structure of 17-carbon, which means that steroids are given two traits, androgenic and anabolic properties . The androgenic property of s...
Silverstein, Alvin, Virginia B. Silverstein, and Robert A. Silverstein. Steroids: big muscles, big problems. Hillside, N.J.: Enslow Pub., 1992. Print.
Anabolic steroids have become an epidemic amongst athletes since the 1950's when a Swiss company by the name of Ciba Pharmaceuticals introduced what was to become the most popular anabolic drug for athletes called methandrostenolone. “By this time, the era of the steroid athlete was well underway and world records were being shattered and re-shattered with remarkable regularity.” (Oklobdzija & Weyrauch, 1989, para 3) From then on, there have been many cases throughout professional sports where athletes are reported or caught using anabolic steroids.
Every year high school, college, and professional athletes try to get just ?a little bigger,??a little stronger,? and to increase the amount of weights they lift by, ?just a few pounds.? To achieve these goals athletes often turn to anabolic steroids to aid them in achieving their goals. Anabolic steroids are a quick, but dangerous way to increase muscle mass, and they can carry many risks including some life threatening side affects. Years after taking steroids athletes can live to have serious heart problems, sterility, or possibly not even live, all because of foolish decisions they made in the past. These potentially fatal drugs are not widely known by young athletes at all, because they don?t know about the risks that can go along with them. In school, every student is taught about marijuana, cocaine,heroin, sex, liquor, and all those other health risks, but they?re never taught about ?roids? or ?juice.? (slang words for steroids) That should be changed, because it is known that student athletes often use steroids, not knowing the risks. Many times they take the risk because they hear about professional athletes taking steroids. But, despite their widespread use in sports, steroids can have more negative than positive effects on athletes of all types. Steroids are chemical substances that can be made naturally by the body or produced synthetically. There are many different types of steroids that are used for different things other than just athletes enhancing muscles. For example, there are types of steroids that can be used by women as birth control pills, and other types that are used for menopause treatment. The abuse of steroids is almost always found to be in the case of athletes, and that is the focus of this paper. ?All anabolic steroids are synthetic compounds whose molecular structure is similar to that of the natural male sex hormone testosterone. Testosterone affects development of the male body in two important ways: it has an anabolic effect - increases growth, especially of muscular and skeletal tissue - And an androgenic effect - increased development of male sexual characteristics. Anabolic steroids are constructed stythetically in such a way that they maximize the anabolic effect of testosterone while minimizing the androgenic effect.? The way that steroids work can easily be interpreted by a foo...
There are many types of steroids abused by athletes in order to increase their muscle mass and strength. Though steroids have a negative reputation, there are some that can be beneficial to athletes and certain patients. There are types of steroids called corticosteroids that have more medical uses to them and another type called anabolic-androgenic steroids that have a more limited medical use. The anabolic-androgenic are usually the steroids that are being abused by athletes (Bigelow, par.10). The use of steroids goes back to the end of World War II around the 1940’s. Doctors were giving the freed prisoners from the Nazi concentration camps that were at risk of death anabolic-androgenic steroids to help gain back their muscle mass and weight faster. From this knowledge, steroids began to be used by body builders and athletes to get more fit than they already were. It is believed that the abuse of the steroids started in the late 1940’s by weight lifters and bodybuilders, and by the 1950’s, it was spread to the Olympics (Bigelow, par.11). Any type of steroid should not be used if they are only going to be abused by being used in large doses with the intentions of increasing lean muscle mass and strength (Bigelow, par.11). After years of abuse of anabolic-androgenic steroids in the Olympics they were added to the list of banned substances and random testing of athletes were announced to start taking place (Bigelow, par.35).
Dangerous are Performance-Enhancing Drugs?”). Despite the research done on the effects of steroids, not everyone believes in the negative effects of steroids. One of these people is University of Wisconsin at Madison professor of pediatrics and bioethics, Norman Fost, who stated, “… name an athlete who died, or was diagnosed, with a steroid-related cancer, heart disease, or stroke,” (Newton 105). What Fost is saying is that without any direct deaths from steroids, life-threatening effects cannot be professed (Newton 105, Bjornlund 24-26).
What most consider the primary reason against the use of these steroids is the ‘unfair advantage’ created by users, which is regularly referred to as ‘cheating’. A few years ago, Lance Armstrong was dispossessed of every single one of his Tour de France achievements, with the claim that he was cheating. Nicomachean Ethics could be viwed to disagree with this penalty on the grounds of Armstrong’s action simply being a part of the pursuit towards ‘supreme Good’. However, as the Union Cycliste Internationale labeled other competitors as also being “under a cloud of suspicion”, the titles taken from Armstrong weren’t granted to any other competitor; which presents the question of whom exactly Armstrong cheated against.
Sjöqvist, F., Garle, M., & Rane, A. (2008). Use of doping agents, particularly anabolic steroids, in sports and society. The Lancet, 371(9627), 1872-82. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.wccnet.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/199020019?accountid=29090