Letters

From the April 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Most of Thomas' other swipes may well pass without comment. I will, however, express amazement at the notion that the only reason jurors would ever wish to take notes is to substitute for the functions of the written trial transcript they will have a chance to see later.

Steroids and Meatheads

Dayn Perry's "Pumped-Up Hysteria" (January) was a piece of sanity amid drug hysteria in barbell circles. I'm a former lifter who has taken steroids. I never saw a single case of steroid rage. In fact, I never even heard of one until the media wrote stories on it.

There are a number of arguments against steroid use, but they don't go far. Some say that it isn't fair to have an athlete assume a risk that is not intrinsic to doing the sport. Well, in the pole vault, today's fiberglass poles can break in midair, unlike the old stiff poles. You can land on your head. Is that intrinsic to the sport?

Is Astroturf intrinsic to football? Sports are always changing and are defined by the current practice at the highest levels.

When I was competing, I would have preferred to have the snatch and clean and jerk and not the press as competitive lifts, and to have had a weight class around 230. But in those days the class went from 198 to the huge guys. I had to force-feed and go up to 252 to have a shot. I wasn't coerced. That was just the way it was. When I retired because of a back injury, they introduced a 220-pound class, and later a 242 class, and now they are back to 231 pounds. They dropped the press in the mid-'70s too. Oh well. My lumps.

Finally, I don't think the Olympic Committee can say much about health concerns until they ban smoking. Many foreign lifters smoke. There was some hilarious hide and seek at the Atlanta games in 1996. The Turkish lifters wanted to smoke in between lifts, but the American aides were under instructions that no one could smoke indoors. It is quite something to go into the men's room and find the whole Turkish team in there puffing away.

Doug Stalker
Newark, DE

It is refreshing to finally read an article by someone who understands the lack of a steroid problem. I am a nationally ranked power lifter who took steroids and lived in the steroid subculture from 1979 through 1985. I know what a steroid body looks like, and they aren't in major league baseball.

I'm bothered by nitwit sportswriters who never touched a weight reporting about steroids. I am convinced that when they hear that a ballplayer is taking a pro-hormone they report it as steroid use. Anyone who ever took steroids knows that no one got big taking pro-hormones. They are a total waste of money. Creatine and even basic protein powders work much better.

The other point reporters fail to discuss is that pro baseball players are part of God's gifted world of special athletes who will generally benefit more from weightlifting than the average person. A strong athlete could easily, over the course of, say, six years, lift weights and eat high-density protein supplements and gain an average of five pounds a year. Yet some dorky writer comes along and says, "Barry Bonds is 30 pounds heavier than he was eight years ago so he must be taking steroids."

Russell Clark
Highlands Ranch, CO

Finally, an author has done some extensive homework instead of shooting from the hip! We athletes are infuriated by the media hype about steroids, which is myth-based or just plain nonfactual. I have written many letters to congressmen and sports writers in vain, trying to protest the damaging lies written about athletes who use anabolic enhancing drugs.

It is obvious to any real athlete that the media in general have absolutely no knowledge on the subject of physique-enhancing drugs. Yet they create public uproar, leading equally uneducated politicians to declare war on the drugs and the athletes who use them. It was former President George Bush who signed the Anabolic Steroids Control Act of 1990, making steroids a Schedule III crime, equal to cocaine and amphetamines. Now Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Rep. John Sweeney (D-N.Y.) have taken the torch and are yelling from their soapboxes.

Other methods of physical enhancement, such as liposuction and implants, are all legal yet far more dangerous. Hormones for birth control or gender change are legal. Cigarettes and alcohol kill millions. Meanwhile, the great threat to athletes from steroids is only the possibility of being caught and arrested, and the fiasco that will follow.

Mike Schlanger
Baltimore, MD

Thanks for an excellent overview on steroid hysteria. Back in 1986 and 1988, when I was counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, I had the steroid issue in my file. I thought then that the whole controversy was a concoction. Steroids did not belong in the Controlled Substances Act.

The sports world accepts all kinds of technological innovations -- except certain classes of chemicals. If drug use is so terrible, then establish two leagues -- one in which drug use is permitted and one in which it is not. It would be interesting to see how large the market would be for the drug-free league.

Eric E. Sterling
Silver Spring, MD

Coffee Bean Counters

If anything, Jackson Kuhl underestimates the virtues of Starbucks' competition in the marketplace ("Tempest in a Coffeepot," January). According to The Wall Street Journal, far from driving out other U.S. coffee shops, Starbucks has created a demand for upscale coffee, one that independent coffeehouses often fill. They thrive alongside Starbucks (literally, in the case of a coffeehouse near my college) by offering hangouts with character.

It's also ironic that Starbucks opponents complain about spreading its "monoculture" overseas: Starbucks is a bit of Americana, so why shouldn't Italians or Austrians be able to get a taste of it for a few euros? It's cheaper than traveling to the U.S., and they can still patronize their local favorites. The alternative is a European monoculture.

Jay Weiser
Associate Professor of Law
Zicklin School of Business
Baruch College
New York, NY

Free Will vs. Psychiatry

In his review of Pharmacracy ("Head GamesHead Games," January), Jacob Sullum quotes Thomas Szasz: "Attributing mental illnesses...to biological alterations occurring at a 'subcellular level' is a parody of the denial of free will, choice, and responsibility."

Extensive research into the brain's neuroadaptation to drugs shows that at least part of the explanation of addiction lies at the subcellular level. Dependence, tolerance, and craving for nicotine, alcohol, and other drugs are a function of changes, brought about by substance use, in the number and responsiveness of neurotransmitter binding sites in various brain systems regulating behavior.

More generally, any scientifically sound and complete explanation of addictive behavior or other disorders, whether at the subcellular, neural, or personal levels, must perforce involve the denial of free will, since free will (at least in the libertarian sense of an uncaused chooser) is precisely that which can't be explained by causal analysis.

In order to defend free will, Szasz and others wedded to the libertarian notion of freedom must hold that science can't fully explain human behavior: that we are in some deep sense causally privileged over the rest of nature. But there is no evidence for such causal exceptionalism, only the traditional supposition that for people to be held responsible, they must be ultimately self-caused in some respect. This supposition too is increasingly being called into question, as it becomes clear that moral and criminal responsibility can be reconceived as necessary guides to behavior for rational but nevertheless fully determined agents. In other words, holding people responsible helps to create good choices.

A complete scientific explanation of addiction and other disorders, therefore, need not be forsworn in favor of choice and responsibility, since these turn out to be entirely compatible with causality. Admitting we are not exceptions to nature can only further the humanitarian mission of learning how and why we behave as we do, whether in sickness or in health.

Thomas W. Clark
Boston, MA