Solidifies him being a douche bag for that press conference he did last year(?) at the beginning of the season.
Shows: 6.27.08 Hartford, CT/5.15.10 Hartford, CT/6.18.2011 Hartford, CT (EV Solo)/10.19.13 Brooklyn/10.25.13 Hartford
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Love it. It's time for all the Brewers fans to stop defending him. The blind loyalty for him was disgusting. Now it's time they stay quiet for good.
Alpine Valley 6/26/98, Alpine Valley 10/8/00, Champaign 4/23/03, Chicago 6/18/03, Alpine Valley 6/21/03, Grand Rapids 10/3/04
Chicago 5/16/06, Chicago 5/17/06, Grand Rapids 5/19/06
Milwaukee 6/29/06, Milwaukee 6/30/06, Lollapalooza 8/5/07
Eddie Solo Milwaukee 8/19/08, Toronto 8/21/09, Chicago 8/23/09
Chicago 8/24/09, Indianapolis 5/7/10, Ed Chicago 6/29/11, Alpine Valley 9/3/11 and 9/4/11, Wrigley 7/19/13, Moline 10/18/14, Milwaukee 10/20/14
Wait this is supposed to push me over the top? Really, evidence that lines up stating that they paid the dude around the same time, and a reference to him that could easily be a joke. Don't get me wrong I'm a Brewer fan and totally think that he did it. If fact, I wish he did admit it and then speak up for the use of PEDs. I mean seriously we want to think that controlling someone's intake of drugs that make them better at their jobs is ever possible? Why not just let the players go as far as they want with drugs that make them better at their job? If it's for "athlete safety" I call bullshit, because we have already demonstrated that we don't give a fuck. If it's for some idea that we want athletes "natural," well what the fuck is natural? Sticking a tendon in someone's elbow or ankle, or hamstring in their knee? Do players all have to do the same workout? Eat the same foods (what food constitutes natural)?
does the fact that pro sports have historically shown a lack of concern for athlete safety preclude it from acting in a way that is in the interests of safety and fairness!? ...
i hear ya that they haven't always shown that they give a fuck and it's somewhat hypocritical to start now but things have changed a bit ... in hockey, blows to the head are now penalties and cause suspensions; the nfl has new rules for player safety ... it may be a bit of window dressing but it's still something ...
for me PEDs have always been about one thing ... and that is every athlete should have the opportunity to compete on a level playing field without having to sacrifice his/her health ... it's not so much about an athlete who'd make that sacrifice - it's for the athletes who choose not to ...
does the fact that pro sports have historically shown a lack of concern for athlete safety preclude it from acting in a way that is in the interests of safety and fairness!? ...
i hear ya that they haven't always shown that they give a fuck and it's somewhat hypocritical to start now but things have changed a bit ... in hockey, blows to the head are now penalties and cause suspensions; the nfl has new rules for player safety ... it may be a bit of window dressing but it's still something ...
for me PEDs have always been about one thing ... and that is every athlete should have the opportunity to compete on a level playing field without having to sacrifice his/her health ... it's not so much about an athlete who'd make that sacrifice - it's for the athletes who choose not to ...
I guess that gets into our not seeing eye to eye on the philosophy of the "level playing field". How level is the playing field truly? You think Dominican baseball players have the same relationship with food consumption and their bodies as American's? Why do they gain 30 lbs on average after coming to the U.S.? My argument is that we can NEVER level the playing field because individual people have some advantages over others that they did not earn or deserve just by being born to the right family. Thus why are we going to pretend like trying to control drug use is going to "level the playing field"?
On top of that think about your job. If you were to be rewarded monetarily for doing something better, and someone offered you an enhancing substance to do it would you? Would you do it if your job was threatened because others were doing it? Even if you wouldn't would you be shocked if your co-workers were doing it? How can any league, WADA, or whatever possibly think they can control this given the context from which athletes are operating? It's a battle that cannot be won. As such why pretend?
I guess that gets into our not seeing eye to eye on the philosophy of the "level playing field". How level is the playing field truly? You think Dominican baseball players have the same relationship with food consumption and their bodies as American's? Why do they gain 30 lbs on average after coming to the U.S.? My argument is that we can NEVER level the playing field because individual people have some advantages over others that they did not earn or deserve just by being born to the right family. Thus why are we going to pretend like trying to control drug use is going to "level the playing field"?
On top of that think about your job. If you were to be rewarded monetarily for doing something better, and someone offered you an enhancing substance to do it would you? Would you do it if your job was threatened because others were doing it? Even if you wouldn't would you be shocked if your co-workers were doing it? How can any league, WADA, or whatever possibly think they can control this given the context from which athletes are operating? It's a battle that cannot be won. As such why pretend?
well ... i think we are definitely getting into things that will cloud the picture for sure ... i'm not sure the 30lbs is a huge advantage as it's probably brought on from shit ass food ... and it looks like players from the domican, puerto rico, venezuela can compete just fine in mlb ... i do understand the notion that there are inherent disadvantages as it pertains to ethnography however, I think that it is muddling up a topic that doesn't necessarily require that ...
i do believe that the battle is being won especially when dollars are not so much a factor ... i believe most athletes would choose to compete clean, especially so if they knew others were held to the same standards ... just because big money sports we watch like football and mlb didn't really care before doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to do ...
norman fost has been with RW (and me) for years....
As controversy swirls, medical ethicist remains a center of calm and certainty
MADISON, Wis. — How can the accomplishments of Bonds, McGuire, Sosa and others of the "steroid era" of baseball be compared to those of Aaron or Ruth? Can Major League Baseball and the National Football League and the others ever get drugs out of their systems? Will the athletes named as users in the Mitchell report face futures threatened by cancer, heart attack, stroke? What will come of the House committee hearings, now postponed until February? Is there any tarnish remover strong enough to put the shine back on sports in America?
As the controversy over use of anabolic steroids by athletes swirls like a wind-whipped snowstorm, Norman Fost, professor of pediatric medicine and director of the Program in Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, is a center of calm and certainty. He says, as he has for many years and virtually alone, that the maelstrom is nothing more than "the hypocrisy, bad facts, inconsistency and moral incoherence of anti-drug hysteria."
To him, athletes who take banned performance-enhancing drugs are as morally and ethically blameless as the pole vaulters who quickly converted from bamboo poles to fiberglass when they saw a competitive edge. Rather than being banned, he insists, steroids should be available, under a doctor's supervision, to any pro or amateur adult athlete who wants them.
For his contrarian stance, the soft-spoken, 68-year-old tennis- and basketball-playing sports junkie who will, he said, "watch anything that moves," has been roundly vilified.
"NPR called me 'the loneliest man in America,'" he said. "The president of the university has forwarded letters from alumni saying they are withdrawing their financial support because of me. I've had sportswriters tell me to wake up to the modern world. I've been called 'the wacko in Wisconsin.'"
If Fost is a wacko, he likely has the most stellar resume in the wacko world. His bachelor's degree is from Princeton, his M.D. from Yale. His residency was at Johns Hopkins and his master's in public health came from Harvard. At Wisconsin in 1973, he founded one of the earliest and most highly regarded and copied bioethics programs in the nation.
"Norm has always been provocative and controversial," said Dr. Mark Siegler, director of MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago and a friend and colleague of Fost's since the '70s. "But his views are always presented in a careful, thoughtful way, and come from a depth of insight and clear thinking."
New Jersey-born Fost recalled that his father, also a pediatrician, was "skeptical when it came to conventional wisdom. He was smart, funny and a pit bull about honesty."
Those genes kicked in vis-a-vis sports for Fost when, in the 1972 Munich summer Olympics, an American swimmer, Rick DuMont, was stripped of a gold medal for taking a banned substance, ephedrine. It was contained in an over-the-counter cold medicine that he took, with the permission of his team doctor, to relieve asthma symptoms.
'Superficial reporting'
"I started thinking about the line between treatment and enhancement," recalled Fost, who takes even aspirin reluctantly. "As time went by, I kept reading more and more superficial reporting about how taking enhancing drugs was immoral."
In 1983, he wrote an editorial for The New York Times titled "Let 'em Take Steroids," an attack on the growing body of conventional and, he thought, bogus wisdom.
At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson would leave in disgrace, portrayed as, Fost said, "a combination of Charles Manson and Adolph Hitler. But the American swimmer Janet Evans was hailed as representing everything good and great."
The difference was that Johnson tested positive for the use of an anabolic steroid while Evans, after her 5,000-meter gold medal win, was lauded for keeping secret from other teams the newly developed, high-tech fabric swimsuit she said helped her to victory.
Watching this morality play of good and evil on his TV, Fost wondered, "Why was Johnson condemned for taking a performance-enhancing drug while Evans' use of a performance-enhancing suit was praised?"
Fost then wrote another New York Times op-ed piece, this one titled "Ben Johnson: World's Fastest Scapegoat."
Just as he found hypocrisy in the stance that one form of enhancement is immoral while another is OK, he found it as well in the hue and cry concerning the health horrors associated with steroid use. He read medical journals from around the world and found no deaths tied to anabolic steroid use, no side effects for adults beyond acne, hair loss, infertility, lowered voices in women -- mostly cosmetic and reversible effects. He allows that, during use, bad lipids in the blood rise while the good decline but said: "This gets translated by the press into statements that there is an increased incidence of heart disease or stroke. I don't know of any evidence of that."
Aggressive behavior
Last February's issue of Behavioral Neuroscience reported on research conducted at Northeastern University by a group headed by Richard Melloni Jr., associate professor of psychology. The group injected a cocktail of various steroids into adolescent hamsters and found the animals becoming aggressive and remaining that way weeks after their last injection.
"After tearing apart thousands upon thousands of animal brains," Melloni said in a telephone interview, "I've concluded that these [anabolic steroids] are dangerous substances and should continue to be banned. They produce dramatic effects on developing systems in adolescents and on already developed systems. Some of the effects seem to reverse when the steroids are no longer used. Some don't."
Melloni's is one of the few labs doing such research and has looked only at animals, though he says research on human brains may become possible with improved neuro-imaging technology.
Fost absolutely opposes giving steroids to adolescents because steroid use can stunt growth. He urges stringent testing of young athletes, and, for those distributing steroids to children: "Hanging followed by a fair trial."
In all the health and morality questions about steroids, Fost said: "It's as though the drug hysteria serves as a distraction from more serious issues. You'd be hard-pressed to find a single death associated with steroid use, yet the TV cameras keep showing [Red Sox manager] Terry Francona drooling disgusting spit from something [chewing tobacco] that has a very high cancer rate associated with it.
"You have 400,000 deaths a year due to tobacco and tens of thousands of alcohol-related deaths, a substance heavily promoted by Major League Baseball, yet the president and Congress and the press have virtually nothing to say about tobacco and alcohol in athletics, but lots to say about steroids. A football player spending more than three years in the NFL has an 80 to 90 percent chance, according to one study, of some permanent disability, but the NFL produces films focusing on the most vicious hits. The dangers to health in sports today come not from enhancement but the sport itself."
Is the tide turning?
The governing bodies of national and international sports and groups such as the International Anti-Doping Agency still hold firm in banning steroids. The federal government continues to sponsor public-service announcements warning of the dangers associated with use. But lately, some scientists, lawyers and writers have come around to Fost's stance.
"I'm not so much the loneliest guy anymore," Fost said.
Nonetheless, he has no illusions that the boogeyman will go away any time soon. He likens the persistent myths on steroids to those concerning the Iraq weapons of mass destruction.
"Even when it came out that there were no such weapons," he said, "having heard over and over that they existed, 40 percent of the public still believed it."
Counterpoints to some common arguments
Dr. Norman Fost has ticked through his arguments against the objections to steroid use often enough that he can do it by rote, stopping only when his listener says something that indicates he gets Fost's point. Then he stops, smiles, points an index finger and says, "Bingo."
Steroids give an unfair advantage. "There are a lot of things in sports that are unfair. In some football games, my beloved Badgers offensive line may outweigh opponents by 60 pounds. That's unfair. It is hypocritical for leaders in Major League Baseball to trumpet their concern about fair competition when one team [the Yankees] is allowed to have a payroll three times larger than most of its competitors.
"Steroids are unfair only if there's unequal access. Removing the ban would give equal access, Also, as long as they are banned, steroids will come from people making them in their bathtubs, no clinical trials as to safety, no oversight of manufacturing process, no long-term studies. If steroids are harmful over the long term, that would be good to know, but under the current conditions, we may never find out."
Athletes are coerced into using steroids. "That would mean there's the use of force or a threat of deprivation. Steroids are an offer to be better off than you are, just as signing up with a professional team is an opportunity to be better off than you are. In the first year of testing in 2003, with the results anonymous and with no penalties, about 6 percent were found to be using steroids but 94 percent were not. If there was coercion, it wasn't working."
Steroids are unnatural. "Testosterone is made by the body. It's the most natural of all steroids. The rest are synthetic. Yet testosterone is the one steroid that we know does cause cancer and therefore is no longer used. Sport hasn't been 'natural' since the first naked Olympian put on sandals. A Nautilus machine isn't natural. Should athletes train only by lifting rocks?"
Steroid use undermines the integrity of the sport. "That's the Bob Costas argument about the validity of records. There already is no validity in comparing athletes era to era. In baseball, the mound is lower, the ball livelier, the fences lower, the sizes of the fields and the rules of play are different. And what do you do about Coors Field?"
Columnist George Will wrote: "Sport -- and a society that takes it seriously -- would be debased if it did not strictly forbid things that blur the distinction between the triumph of character and the triumph of pharmacology."
"Did Barry Bonds undermine the integrity of baseball?" Fost asked rhetorically. "Well, the fans didn't seem to think so." And, a listener noted, the home run race between McGuire and Sosa is widely credited with bringing fans back after the strike.
"Bingo," Fost said.
Steroid users are bad role models for kids. "I'm more concerned about sexual assault, drunk driving and other things kids see some athletes doing."
What about Lyle Alzado? "That question seems to come up every time I do an interview," Fost said. Lyle Alzado, a star defensive end in the NFL, became the poster boy for the dangers of taking steroids because of his death from brain cancer at age 42, a cancer he claimed was brought on by steroid use. So compelling was his story that, now, 16 years after his death, many Web sites about him conclude by saying: "Cause of death: Brain cancer brought on by excessive steroid use." "But there's not a shred of evidence to prove that connection," Fost said. "He was the poster boy for the wrong thing."
If I had known then what I know now...
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
i don't really think this guy makes a compelling case ... i do find the whole notion of the drug war fascinating as on one hand - there are these obtuse laws putting people in jail for doing little to no harm to anyone and on the other ... drugs are prescribed and approved without consequence ...
i believe the impacts of PED's are much like every other health related consequence ... can i prove that using toxic chemical cleaners cause cancer!? ... not likely but it can contribute to someone getting cancer ... for the same reasons that not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer ... when it comes to health - it is very hard to distinguish direct consequence, especially in a world and place that supports the notion of profit over public health in most instances ...
if one could prove that PED's have no health risks whatsoever, i might be inclined to a lift on the ban however, we know taking steroids has side effects and when you look at the list of people who have prematurely died and who have taken steroids ... it's not like we're talking about banning something that has no history of ills ...
i'm all for competitive advantages achieved through dollars, innovation and hard work so long as they are within the rules and spirit of the sport and so long as they have no health consequences ...
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
chris carpenter may be done. I'm not shedding too many tears.
If I had known then what I know now...
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
Comments
Thanks Johnny, I Needed that.
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ryan-braun ... 50670.html
this is going to be a long season. :fp: :fp: :fp: :fp: :fp: :fp:
www.cluthelee.com
www.cluthe.com
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
you are WHITE HOT braun
Love it. It's time for all the Brewers fans to stop defending him. The blind loyalty for him was disgusting. Now it's time they stay quiet for good.
Chicago 5/16/06, Chicago 5/17/06, Grand Rapids 5/19/06
Milwaukee 6/29/06, Milwaukee 6/30/06, Lollapalooza 8/5/07
Eddie Solo Milwaukee 8/19/08, Toronto 8/21/09, Chicago 8/23/09
Chicago 8/24/09, Indianapolis 5/7/10, Ed Chicago 6/29/11, Alpine Valley 9/3/11 and 9/4/11, Wrigley 7/19/13, Moline 10/18/14, Milwaukee 10/20/14
and exactly....this isn't going to get Braun defenders to change their minds.
does the fact that pro sports have historically shown a lack of concern for athlete safety preclude it from acting in a way that is in the interests of safety and fairness!? ...
i hear ya that they haven't always shown that they give a fuck and it's somewhat hypocritical to start now but things have changed a bit ... in hockey, blows to the head are now penalties and cause suspensions; the nfl has new rules for player safety ... it may be a bit of window dressing but it's still something ...
for me PEDs have always been about one thing ... and that is every athlete should have the opportunity to compete on a level playing field without having to sacrifice his/her health ... it's not so much about an athlete who'd make that sacrifice - it's for the athletes who choose not to ...
this.
On top of that think about your job. If you were to be rewarded monetarily for doing something better, and someone offered you an enhancing substance to do it would you? Would you do it if your job was threatened because others were doing it? Even if you wouldn't would you be shocked if your co-workers were doing it? How can any league, WADA, or whatever possibly think they can control this given the context from which athletes are operating? It's a battle that cannot be won. As such why pretend?
well ... i think we are definitely getting into things that will cloud the picture for sure ... i'm not sure the 30lbs is a huge advantage as it's probably brought on from shit ass food ... and it looks like players from the domican, puerto rico, venezuela can compete just fine in mlb ... i do understand the notion that there are inherent disadvantages as it pertains to ethnography however, I think that it is muddling up a topic that doesn't necessarily require that ...
i do believe that the battle is being won especially when dollars are not so much a factor ... i believe most athletes would choose to compete clean, especially so if they knew others were held to the same standards ... just because big money sports we watch like football and mlb didn't really care before doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to do ...
As controversy swirls, medical ethicist remains a center of calm and certainty
MADISON, Wis. — How can the accomplishments of Bonds, McGuire, Sosa and others of the "steroid era" of baseball be compared to those of Aaron or Ruth? Can Major League Baseball and the National Football League and the others ever get drugs out of their systems? Will the athletes named as users in the Mitchell report face futures threatened by cancer, heart attack, stroke? What will come of the House committee hearings, now postponed until February? Is there any tarnish remover strong enough to put the shine back on sports in America?
As the controversy over use of anabolic steroids by athletes swirls like a wind-whipped snowstorm, Norman Fost, professor of pediatric medicine and director of the Program in Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, is a center of calm and certainty. He says, as he has for many years and virtually alone, that the maelstrom is nothing more than "the hypocrisy, bad facts, inconsistency and moral incoherence of anti-drug hysteria."
To him, athletes who take banned performance-enhancing drugs are as morally and ethically blameless as the pole vaulters who quickly converted from bamboo poles to fiberglass when they saw a competitive edge. Rather than being banned, he insists, steroids should be available, under a doctor's supervision, to any pro or amateur adult athlete who wants them.
For his contrarian stance, the soft-spoken, 68-year-old tennis- and basketball-playing sports junkie who will, he said, "watch anything that moves," has been roundly vilified.
"NPR called me 'the loneliest man in America,'" he said. "The president of the university has forwarded letters from alumni saying they are withdrawing their financial support because of me. I've had sportswriters tell me to wake up to the modern world. I've been called 'the wacko in Wisconsin.'"
If Fost is a wacko, he likely has the most stellar resume in the wacko world. His bachelor's degree is from Princeton, his M.D. from Yale. His residency was at Johns Hopkins and his master's in public health came from Harvard. At Wisconsin in 1973, he founded one of the earliest and most highly regarded and copied bioethics programs in the nation.
"Norm has always been provocative and controversial," said Dr. Mark Siegler, director of MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago and a friend and colleague of Fost's since the '70s. "But his views are always presented in a careful, thoughtful way, and come from a depth of insight and clear thinking."
New Jersey-born Fost recalled that his father, also a pediatrician, was "skeptical when it came to conventional wisdom. He was smart, funny and a pit bull about honesty."
Those genes kicked in vis-a-vis sports for Fost when, in the 1972 Munich summer Olympics, an American swimmer, Rick DuMont, was stripped of a gold medal for taking a banned substance, ephedrine. It was contained in an over-the-counter cold medicine that he took, with the permission of his team doctor, to relieve asthma symptoms.
'Superficial reporting'
"I started thinking about the line between treatment and enhancement," recalled Fost, who takes even aspirin reluctantly. "As time went by, I kept reading more and more superficial reporting about how taking enhancing drugs was immoral."
In 1983, he wrote an editorial for The New York Times titled "Let 'em Take Steroids," an attack on the growing body of conventional and, he thought, bogus wisdom.
At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson would leave in disgrace, portrayed as, Fost said, "a combination of Charles Manson and Adolph Hitler. But the American swimmer Janet Evans was hailed as representing everything good and great."
The difference was that Johnson tested positive for the use of an anabolic steroid while Evans, after her 5,000-meter gold medal win, was lauded for keeping secret from other teams the newly developed, high-tech fabric swimsuit she said helped her to victory.
Watching this morality play of good and evil on his TV, Fost wondered, "Why was Johnson condemned for taking a performance-enhancing drug while Evans' use of a performance-enhancing suit was praised?"
Fost then wrote another New York Times op-ed piece, this one titled "Ben Johnson: World's Fastest Scapegoat."
Just as he found hypocrisy in the stance that one form of enhancement is immoral while another is OK, he found it as well in the hue and cry concerning the health horrors associated with steroid use. He read medical journals from around the world and found no deaths tied to anabolic steroid use, no side effects for adults beyond acne, hair loss, infertility, lowered voices in women -- mostly cosmetic and reversible effects. He allows that, during use, bad lipids in the blood rise while the good decline but said: "This gets translated by the press into statements that there is an increased incidence of heart disease or stroke. I don't know of any evidence of that."
Aggressive behavior
Last February's issue of Behavioral Neuroscience reported on research conducted at Northeastern University by a group headed by Richard Melloni Jr., associate professor of psychology. The group injected a cocktail of various steroids into adolescent hamsters and found the animals becoming aggressive and remaining that way weeks after their last injection.
"After tearing apart thousands upon thousands of animal brains," Melloni said in a telephone interview, "I've concluded that these [anabolic steroids] are dangerous substances and should continue to be banned. They produce dramatic effects on developing systems in adolescents and on already developed systems. Some of the effects seem to reverse when the steroids are no longer used. Some don't."
Melloni's is one of the few labs doing such research and has looked only at animals, though he says research on human brains may become possible with improved neuro-imaging technology.
Fost absolutely opposes giving steroids to adolescents because steroid use can stunt growth. He urges stringent testing of young athletes, and, for those distributing steroids to children: "Hanging followed by a fair trial."
In all the health and morality questions about steroids, Fost said: "It's as though the drug hysteria serves as a distraction from more serious issues. You'd be hard-pressed to find a single death associated with steroid use, yet the TV cameras keep showing [Red Sox manager] Terry Francona drooling disgusting spit from something [chewing tobacco] that has a very high cancer rate associated with it.
"You have 400,000 deaths a year due to tobacco and tens of thousands of alcohol-related deaths, a substance heavily promoted by Major League Baseball, yet the president and Congress and the press have virtually nothing to say about tobacco and alcohol in athletics, but lots to say about steroids. A football player spending more than three years in the NFL has an 80 to 90 percent chance, according to one study, of some permanent disability, but the NFL produces films focusing on the most vicious hits. The dangers to health in sports today come not from enhancement but the sport itself."
Is the tide turning?
The governing bodies of national and international sports and groups such as the International Anti-Doping Agency still hold firm in banning steroids. The federal government continues to sponsor public-service announcements warning of the dangers associated with use. But lately, some scientists, lawyers and writers have come around to Fost's stance.
"I'm not so much the loneliest guy anymore," Fost said.
Nonetheless, he has no illusions that the boogeyman will go away any time soon. He likens the persistent myths on steroids to those concerning the Iraq weapons of mass destruction.
"Even when it came out that there were no such weapons," he said, "having heard over and over that they existed, 40 percent of the public still believed it."
Counterpoints to some common arguments
Dr. Norman Fost has ticked through his arguments against the objections to steroid use often enough that he can do it by rote, stopping only when his listener says something that indicates he gets Fost's point. Then he stops, smiles, points an index finger and says, "Bingo."
Steroids give an unfair advantage. "There are a lot of things in sports that are unfair. In some football games, my beloved Badgers offensive line may outweigh opponents by 60 pounds. That's unfair. It is hypocritical for leaders in Major League Baseball to trumpet their concern about fair competition when one team [the Yankees] is allowed to have a payroll three times larger than most of its competitors.
"Steroids are unfair only if there's unequal access. Removing the ban would give equal access, Also, as long as they are banned, steroids will come from people making them in their bathtubs, no clinical trials as to safety, no oversight of manufacturing process, no long-term studies. If steroids are harmful over the long term, that would be good to know, but under the current conditions, we may never find out."
Athletes are coerced into using steroids. "That would mean there's the use of force or a threat of deprivation. Steroids are an offer to be better off than you are, just as signing up with a professional team is an opportunity to be better off than you are. In the first year of testing in 2003, with the results anonymous and with no penalties, about 6 percent were found to be using steroids but 94 percent were not. If there was coercion, it wasn't working."
Steroids are unnatural. "Testosterone is made by the body. It's the most natural of all steroids. The rest are synthetic. Yet testosterone is the one steroid that we know does cause cancer and therefore is no longer used. Sport hasn't been 'natural' since the first naked Olympian put on sandals. A Nautilus machine isn't natural. Should athletes train only by lifting rocks?"
Steroid use undermines the integrity of the sport. "That's the Bob Costas argument about the validity of records. There already is no validity in comparing athletes era to era. In baseball, the mound is lower, the ball livelier, the fences lower, the sizes of the fields and the rules of play are different. And what do you do about Coors Field?"
Columnist George Will wrote: "Sport -- and a society that takes it seriously -- would be debased if it did not strictly forbid things that blur the distinction between the triumph of character and the triumph of pharmacology."
"Did Barry Bonds undermine the integrity of baseball?" Fost asked rhetorically. "Well, the fans didn't seem to think so." And, a listener noted, the home run race between McGuire and Sosa is widely credited with bringing fans back after the strike.
"Bingo," Fost said.
Steroid users are bad role models for kids. "I'm more concerned about sexual assault, drunk driving and other things kids see some athletes doing."
What about Lyle Alzado? "That question seems to come up every time I do an interview," Fost said. Lyle Alzado, a star defensive end in the NFL, became the poster boy for the dangers of taking steroids because of his death from brain cancer at age 42, a cancer he claimed was brought on by steroid use. So compelling was his story that, now, 16 years after his death, many Web sites about him conclude by saying: "Cause of death: Brain cancer brought on by excessive steroid use." "But there's not a shred of evidence to prove that connection," Fost said. "He was the poster boy for the wrong thing."
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
i believe the impacts of PED's are much like every other health related consequence ... can i prove that using toxic chemical cleaners cause cancer!? ... not likely but it can contribute to someone getting cancer ... for the same reasons that not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer ... when it comes to health - it is very hard to distinguish direct consequence, especially in a world and place that supports the notion of profit over public health in most instances ...
if one could prove that PED's have no health risks whatsoever, i might be inclined to a lift on the ban however, we know taking steroids has side effects and when you look at the list of people who have prematurely died and who have taken steroids ... it's not like we're talking about banning something that has no history of ills ...
i'm all for competitive advantages achieved through dollars, innovation and hard work so long as they are within the rules and spirit of the sport and so long as they have no health consequences ...
head over....
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=202814
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
todd helton's DUI mugshot from last night
Wow. someone had too many drinkies.
hammered. like 81 hammered
But... his zipper has morning wood.
he may be sober today......but still FAT :shock:
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/ ... s-in-2008/
I hate that man, but bad Boston press is something I enjoy very much.
Wow, i do question the timing of this, Curt is in major debt and facing an uphill legal battle.
Yeah, true. Everything he does seems to have some other self serving motive. Will we hear about a book soon, perhaps?
C'mon curt give us some names :corn:
There are two pretty big names that are no longer there that we're big parts of the organization then. That would be awesome.
No doubt