While it is true that it continues to be difficult to discover its use, it is clear that those deciding to take performance-enhancing drugs, as a minimum, are undergoing a moral choice which they have failed.
When caught and found guilty, they should be banned for life and deemed to have retired from the date at which it is decided that they began taking these artificual stimulants.
Their records and statistics until that point will remain on the record.
Onésimo Alvarez-Moro
See article:
"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball," wrote the French-born American essayist Jacques Barzun in 1954. The sentiment is less silly than it sounds. A week ago Sports Illustrated magazine published excerpts from a new book alleging that Barry Bonds – the outfielder for the San Francisco Giants who in 2001 hit more home runs in a single season than anyone in history – owed many of his achievements to steroids. On the internet, the article got more hits than the magazine's annual swimsuit issue. Major League Baseball may open an investigation next week. Bonds denies using steroids, but the scandal has turned into a national crisis, appearing on news, as well as sports, pages.
US law has imposed criminal penalties for illegal steroids since 1990. Balco, the laboratory linked to Bonds, specialised in "designer" steroids that could not be detected even by the most stringent testing regimes, according to Sports Illustrated, and marketed a zinc and magnesium supplement as a front for its real product. Bonds' personal trainer, who sold human growth hormone and testosterone procured from Aids patients, was jailed last summer. Several prominent baseball players have admitted to steroid use and Americans now understand the criminality that surrounds the world of steroids, blood-thickeners and hormonal treatments. Premature deaths of confessed steroid users have made the dangers plain, too. Team owners and players' unions have colluded to block any steroid-testing regime with teeth, and few fans have objected. So why has this case hit a nerve?
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