Adam Feeley

Professor Lutz

25 October 2011

Drug Testing

            The improvements with modern technology and the study with medicine have greatly changed. When growing up playing sports you can be pressured into many situations that you feel like you need an edge. With the professional sports being the ideal icon to many teenagers the players can be a great impact on how the teenagers act with their friends or family. If they can have an impact on how they act and even look with the clothes they wear, the teenagers will even want to have their type of body meaning big, cut and thinking it’s a healthy body. Teens are going to try anything to achieve that type of body or style of performance. This can lead to an unhealthy lifestyle for many young men and women because there are more bad side effects of using performance-enhancing drugs than good effects. Lately, with Major League Baseball and the National Football Association there have been more cases with players using steroids or drugs to be able to play while hurt or have an unfair advantage. Steroids have been proven to build muscle and boost their athletic performance, but many people don’t realize the bad side effects that affect your health down the road. High school athletes that include freshman until your senior year of high school should be drug tested while playing sports and throughout the off-season. By drug testing high school athletes it will stop the growth of steroids and illegal drugs that occur in high schools in today’s society.

            First, understanding how steroids work. Anabolic steroids are synthetic versions of the male sex hormone testosterone. Steroids work by filling the cell receptors that tell the cells to make new proteins. While it’s normal for the body to create new proteins, the steroids just tell the cells to create the proteins at a faster rate (Rogozkin). They enter through the blood stream and enter through the liver and are distributed throughout the body, manly to the muscles right after a workout. When you work out you create small tears in your muscles that need to be built up by protein which steroids make happen at a faster rate. Not only does steroids work to build muscle and to build bulk for bodybuilders or athletes, it also works for sprinters or pitchers because it helps athletes who need a faster turnaround from soreness. It is found more in baseball players which you may be asking yourself why baseball players? When it’s one sport you don’t need to be big to be successful. Baseball players use steroids because it enhances their hand eye coronation which makes their reaction time faster. With this being said, it makes there fast twitch muscles stronger so they can have a faster bat which will produce a longer ball or more homeruns. For pitchers, it enhances their rotator cuff muscles so they can whip the ball around faster and its one reason why we have seen pitches reach up to 106 miles per hour during the season.

                        One writer Julian Savulescu said in a debate about the use of steroids in sports “to say that we should reduce drugs in sport or eliminate them because they increase performance, is simply like saying that we should eliminate alcohol from parties because it increases sociability.” I understand where he is coming from but talking about a serious life threatening drug that not only cheats the game by increasing your ability to perform, it puts that athlete a greater risk. He talks about this as if it means nothing or is not as big deal. To not eliminate a drug that increases your performance is ridiculous when other people are willing to put their body through hell the hard way to reach their lifetime goal, it shouldn’t be interrupted by people who are taking the easy way out. There are many life threatening effects that come with using steroids such as “aggressiveness, acne, injury to the connective tissues, damaged liver and negatively altered cholesterol levels” (Steroid Abuse). Some people know these effects that can occur to their bodies but most people are not aware because the media does not do a good job by advertising against steroids. Here is one commercial that was displayed on ESPN in the past years but has not been aired in a long time which I think is wrong because it never gets old. They should run this commercial during the Little League World Series when most young kids are watching to put awareness into young teenager’s minds. By seeing this is makes you think about using steroids because of how they destroy the body and how they do such a good job demonstrating the effects that it can have on a person’s body.

An article off of East Carolina baseball’s website had a statement from their head coach on what he thought about steroids and baseball. "I think steroids in college baseball is getting out of hand," said East Carolina head coach Randy Mazey, although he said it has not been an issue with his team. "It filters down from the majors. Steroids in college baseball is a problem."(Powell Jr). This quote has a great impact on how coaches around the country view drugs in the game of baseball. It is getting out of hand, but it is coming down from the majors which is also true because if that’s what it takes to play at that level so many young players and teens are going to follow because they want to play at that level and the major league players are making it seem like that is the only way you can reach the pro’s.   

-this is just a rough draft, I’m struggling where to go from here.

Essay 2

Adam Feeley

Professor Lutz

Essay 2

10/23/11

Drug Testing in High Schools

            Introduction

1.      How there is advancement in technology

2.      The breakthrough enhancements with medicine

3.      To just give the reader a background of information about drug testing in high schools

4.      Thesis-

My side

1.      The video from CBS on drug testing in high schools(http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=2861154n) 

2.      Facts to state the health risks it has on young teens and how they are actually hurting their bodies instead of advancing their bodies.

3.      How it’s cheating the game

4.      It’s not worth it in the end

5.      Changed the game in baseball- the most

6.      Picture of a changed athlete through his times as you can clearly tell they took steroids.

7.      Shouldn’t want our pro’s doing it when young kids look up to them

8.      High schools/ colleges need to start testing for steroids and not just “street drugs”

9.      They know they are doing it, it’s a choice, they know when they sign it’s against any pro league and the NCAA

The other side

1.      3 authors from the debate on steroids, eliminating wouldn’t be successful

2.      Not worth the cost

3.      If it was natural people wouldn’t complain about it

4.      Shows side effects but no exact deaths relating exactly to steroids

5.      Video about showing it’s not as bad as people say it is.

Conclusion

1.      Give another crucial point or fact

2.      Restate my thesis

15

I am thinking about doing my blog on the topics of drug testing in high school as affective or not affective it would be, gun control, why are we still over in Afghanistan, and legalize marijuana. On this blog I am going to answer the questions that deal with the War. One blog I found the title is Peace Action West. It is formed for people to become educated on whether to leave the war and why we shouldn’t be over there, and how it impacts more than just lives but even the ones that come back. Written by Rebecca Griffin. It appeals pretty well because it had two video's for you to watch as well as pictures. It was well done. It is different than other essays because you can have videos on paper to show an impact. The next blog I found was War News Updates and this one was constructed really different from other blogs and even essays. It had videos and very emotional pictures to pursue you to see what soldiers are going through and how hard it is over there. There were dates, amount of deaths, how many people died in the different areas and where they were from, a very emotional page for the American troops. There were many different authors; pretty much a new one for each video, piece of information was used to put together one page or one blog. The third blog I found was called Data Blog; it was set up different than the others as well. It starts off with a picture and describing how not only Americans are dying from this war. How British soldiers have died helping out, and it later mentions the innocent people of Afghanistan. Not too many people think of it that way, just the American soldiers. It also has a chart on how many people have died which is alarming because it is hard to believe that the numbers on the page are young brave kids that have risked their life for ours. The fourth blog I found was the Mil Blog, this was set up to honor the military but also for them to use and stay connected with what was going on back home, it was really neat. Set up by Willy Stern. All of these are different than essay's and each show a little more or different ways to get across a point.   

14

While the text What We're Doing When We Blog I found a couple of things that I thought were hotspots such as when it said “What we write about does not define us as bloggers; it’s how we write about it”(297). I believe this is true in any style of writing; your paper defines you as writing by how you wrote it. The way you went about your paper, the arguments, and point of views you took to reach your goal because there are many ways to do a blog or paper. But, it just depends on your style of writing and not to be afraid to take an angle of view no one else would, sometimes it's the right view. Another thing that I was a hotspot when I was reading was when it said "if the reader and author are on the page at the same time they experience a moment of shared experience"(Ramage, Bean, Johnson 296). This reminded me of Twitter, by posting something to a famous person or someone across the world how you think highly of, and they respond back. It is like meeting that person or actually having a conversation with that famous person and you feel really excited. 

13

While reading the text, I noticed quite a few things that caught my eye. One thing that I thought was interesting was "You don’t have to surprise everyone in the world, just those who hold a mistaken or marrow view of your topic” (Ramage, Bean and Johnson 184). I thought this was pretty cool to think about because it is true. When you write a paper some people try to make it perfect acting like they are writing to the world and to have so many views in their paper. When actually they just need to address the audience of who they are writing too. And I just thought it was true because you can relate that to many other things in life, it only takes one to like you, or a coach to offer you, or for someone to like your writing, it doesn't take the world.

 Another thing that caught my eye was saying that "Evidence is not the same as "proof"" (Ramage, Bean, Johnson 214). Being in the law major I found this quite eye popping because I always feel like having strong evidence is having the proof to make your case. It was weird how he made it work for his examples and how he thought having evidence wasn't always being facts, but when I hear that I think of a court case and I believe that is always facts, especially to put someone away, you’re going to need to facts to make your case which would  be the evidence. Just thought it was good to read.

Blog 11

1. Tim Tebow's speech after the Ole Miss loss that later made the difference by taking his team to the National Title and winning it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxJg1jQB5Co

2. Bob Knight's halftime speech to his team, (viewer distraction is advised).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw7KijRfU-c

I feel like there is good rhetoric in sports and in coaches by their speeches during, before and after. They display alot of emotions and you can tell by both of these that they are ethical backgrounds with the language in Knights and how Tebow left his speech by saying God bless.