Time to legalize sportstitution

A friend asked, “Whaddaya think of the baseball steroids story?”  I think it’s another nexus where prayer and profit diverge.  Another example of how the Reagan Revolution in conservative American politics cannot hold.  Puritanical social values (like disliking drugs) do not jibe with the prevalent business or social ethic of America.  Make and and sell if for as much as the market will bear.  Steroids?  Fine. The stronger the better. 

The social conservatives would have nobody using any drug NOT approved by their belief system.  For Mormons this would even include caffeine and alcohol, two mighty stimulants to the U.S. economy.  Shut down Budweiser and Starbuck’s?  Close down SmithKlein and Bayer?

Americans currently use more legal drugs than any other country in the world.  We often pay more for those drugs than anybody else because our current political fashion is to de-regulate, allow freedom to the corporations.  That means the majority of Americans suffer on a number of levels: telephone trees not personal service, products from countries where environmental and labor regulations hardly exist, higher prices, massive amounts of energy used to bring goods across the ocean from China and then truck them all over North America.  I recently had to buy some kitchen cabinets: Canadian wood shipped to China where it was milled and assembled, then shipped back to California where it was sold to me.  That only makes economic sense to the cabinet sellers and makers.  It makes no sense to former American cabinet-makers and is egregiously wasteful in terms of the planet and energy use.  Products that can be made locally, should be.  That is what global warming should bring into the equation.  But that would mean somenbody NOT entirely motivated by economic concerns, i.e. profit and greed translated as “shareholder value,” would need to be in a position to influence the system.  Eeek, that would be, I can’t breathe, I can barely bring myself to type… “regulation” or “government interference.”

While we Americans partake of a cornucopia of legal drugs, we also spend billions on “controlled substances.”  Those drugs that for one reason or another, often highly suspect or Puritanical, have been deemed anti-social. Sure meth and other drugs can lead to violent behavior.  Has criminalizing them made them less available?  Never seena violent drunk? If they were cheap and sold rationally, we’d know who took them and how often and might even provide assiatance to the addicts.  The whole heroin miasma is classic: we outlaw a non-violent drug so the addicts have to turn to crime to get it and the sellers are turned into gun-toting criminal gangs to compete in the black market.  As Afghanistan proves anually, heroin is an easy cropto produce.   We coudl grow our own in otherwise wasted corners of the American agricultural lands. Walgreenb’s could use the extra income from selling heroin and clean needles. It might force the Taliban back to goat-herding.  Perhaps this idea could work if we talk about it as “being the poppy crop to America?”  Heroin security and independence?  It seems to be the mantra now on energy.  Hmm…

There’s a lot of money in baseball, bicycle racing, European soccer, American football, basketball, tennis, even Olympic “amateur” sport, etc. etc.  Unlike horse or dog racing where animals are helpless victims of the owners, adult athletes are personally repsonsible for what they knowingly put into their bodies. I don’t think a sports owner or manager should be able to slip drugs secretly into the food or drink of their athletes, but prevent any adult athlete taking a drug to play better or cycle longer or run faster?  Who are we kidding?  A baseball player should simply have a list of the drugs he takes on the back of his baseball card, or in the scorecard.  We think it’s fine if a consmetically altered actor wins an Oscar, so why is it not OK for a steroid freak to win the Home Run title? The way we measure competition in America and Europe: winning and money.  This begins when proto-atheletes are eight to ten years old.  Parents and coaches cheering from the sidelines.By the time kids get to college sports in America the money takes over.  Just because the big universisites don’t pay direct salaries to their football and basketaball players, we pretend these players are amateur.

Let’s clarify one point here: professional sports is not some fine, character-building activity that produces better Americans. That is some myth borrowed from 19th Century England.  Sports in America from high school onward is about producing stars who can propel profits in the athletic sector of the fantasy industry which also includes modelling, video games, YouTube, movies, TV and the entire glamor biz (like celebrity magazines and gossip blogs).  It’s sportstitution, selling their muscled bodies for money, often very big money.  America doesn’t take diet pills away from models, so why do we think we should take muscle drugs away from muscle users?

What about the kids?  I hear the “values” lobby screaming. “Athletes are role models.” Well, there’s the first major cultural mistake.  Athletes who are to win at almost any cost?  Heroes?  Shouldn’t kids look up to the President or at least somebody who’s operating in the real world, like a CEO or TV preacher?  On, yeah, I see your point, on second thought….

Seriously. Tell kids the truth as you should do with all drugs.  And don’t pretend athletes are anything more than highly paid gladiators.  Sure, that firstbaseman looks like The Hulk and can hit 120 mile per hour fastballs further than any normal human can run in two minutes, but his heart will give out and all his ex-wives say he beat them terribly.  Steroids are a terrible thing.  Yes, Uncle F—- stinks and looks sickly because he’s an alcoholic.  Some people drink and can’t stop.  Its a terrible disease and it can ruin your life and health.  But you can also get help.  Yes, Aunt B—– screams, goes beserk once in awhile.  She takes dex and it’s not good for her health or her brain and it eats up all her money.  Yes, Cousin K—-smells like a chimney and smokes constantly.  Her lungs look like the inside of a coal mine and she will likely end up dying a painful death from emphysema while carrying an oxygen bottle on her back.  None of those messages are half as bad as the violent crap our kids can watch on TV any Saturday morning, or find in any good video game they own. The message would even have the salient value of being true.

I’m a former baseball addict myself, a fan as in the origianl “fanatic.” I’ve undergone
self-treatment and a cure.  I once owned a fantasy baseball team every season, for over a decade. A zilion hours were squandered pourikng over stats, reading box scores. When the second baseball strike hit in the early Nineties, I went cold turkey.  I decided it was stupid and disgusting to let a bunch of moronoic, drugged billionaires ruin my private life.  I took up birding.  Birds are serious, sincere, direct, lively and productive. I can say none of those things about the fantasy business we call baseball. Or any other “sport” in America. Birds perform for free, Baseball….

Money corrupts, more money corrupts even more…so if you combine testosterone, money, drugs, more money, show business, a cartel business climate, beer sales, testosterone, even more money, meat products inspected by the Republian FDA, no government regulation of the baseball business, but haphazard regulation of the
American drug business, the need to win, legalized gambling in 145 states, you gotta
expect a little human trashing to go on in baseball.  I don’t think baseball is any more
corrupt that investment banking, real estate, oil industry, Congress, the Pentagon or the court “system.”

It’s sad, of course  The game of baseball played by normal athletes, drugged or otherwise,can be a beautiful pageant, the poetry of the game is wonderful.  The competition and the money turn it into another fantasy industry. The people involved can be scum. Money and winning inevitably dominate. I know of a fine young college player who’s just opted for graduate school rather than a pro baseball career, he had a contract already signed, but decided he couldn’t stand to be around the people involed  in the game. Sounds like politics or pentecostal religion, doesn’t it?

Bottom line on the use of drugs in sports when adults are involved?  Legalize it all and just make it
clear what’s happening…why are steroid freaks
any less moral than liposuctioned, wrinkle-freed,
plastic surgeon-constructed, boob-enhanced bimbos
in Hollywood?  Or actors with painted on tans and their own steroid pecs?

Economically I think this is a low-rick proposition. Drug agents could be re-tained to look for lead pinat on toys and asbestos in imported products. The three pro sports paraphenalia stores in my neighborhood mall will do just fine. I’ve never heard a fan say, I won’t buy his jersey number because he took drugs. Huh?  Drug companies can make more money because they could sell directly to the customer. And we could stop lying to ourselves in America about at least one thing.