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.