I honestly don’t think there is any way to prevent minors from using performance enhancing substances (or any substances for that matter). The introduction of steroids into professional sports is akin to opening Pandora’s box in my opinion.
In other words once you start down that path, there is really no turning back. Which is one of the reasons why I think there is so much supplementation in the professional sports world of today. It probably started out with a few people using, then when they began to pull away from the pack others began using to narrow the gap, until eventually few if any natural athletes are able to even compete.
Perhaps a better option would be not to try to discourage steroid use, but instead to develop new forms of steroids with little if any side effects. Honestly I’m almost certain that there are individuals working on such substances, or individuals trying to develop methods of genetically enhancing athletes (myostatin manipulation for example) as we speak.
What I’m saying is that the problem is not the steroids themselves, the problem is that people want to be able to achieve their goals, but if we keep pushing those goals further and further beyond the reach of natural athletes, then they will have no choice but to look to “un-natural” means to achieve their goals.
Heck, even if we ever got to the point as a species where we truly could manipulate genetics so that every human male looked like (insert favorite bodybuilder), performed like Bo Jackson (who I honestly believe was the best all around athlete of all time), was as strong as Paul Anderson, had an IQ of 140, and lived to be 100+ years old (and let’s just say that the women would all be ideal as well); even if we did all that, you’d still get individuals who wanted to stand out from the crowd and would use performance enhancing methods (perhaps in those days that might be cybernetics).
This is a bit off topic but I just wanted to respond to people against steroids. We all want sports and everything to be fair correct? It’s common sense, it’s what we’re trying to do by banning steroid use. Well is it fair that some people are born and built better then others? Is it fair that some are involved in freak accidents?
Is it fair that eventually some of their bodies will age beyond playable conditioning? No it’s not and that’s part of life, but I believe that if an athlete is doing everything they possibly can, if they’re at their limits and have done everything and sacrificed so much, I think they should be able to take that next step, i.e steroids.
As for being good role models and kids using steroids, that’ll take some regulating, maybe you should only be able to recieve from a doctor and throw on age restrictions like drinking, but even with current laws I know 16-17 year old kids already juicing up.
Laws and pushing things underground is asking for unexperienced and unsupervised use and usually results in the morons dying or screwing their bodies up. I’m not saying make steroids over the counter, but i think they should be legally obtainable.
It’s true that some athletes will be limited, but there will always be athletes who will have an advantage due to their genes. Steroid use will not chance this fact, people with better genes with the same amount of ridiculous training will win. In many sports their is something called ‘strategy’ which is very important to win.
In fact it wasn’t until recently people discovered BJJ, which has turned out to be one of the best fighting styles. What I’m saying is people should focus more on their mental ability and try to learn more, then right away trying to mutate their body. Eventually we are going to see the development of steroids increase, and with that the increase of mutating humans.
Also saying that if steroids were easy to access there wouldn’t be more abuse is ridiculous. It’s not easy to make steroids, which is why there is little abuse now-its hard to get and the people finding it learn a lot along the way- Using alcohol as an example is not a good one, because its very easy to make alcohol and people will get their hands on it also the abuse of alcohol doesn’t affect you quite as fast as steroid abuse.
Teens drinking under age is not nearly as bad as ABUSING steroid use underage . Teens will be the ones abusing the drug much like every other drug, and all teen athletes would abuse it most likely.