When the history of the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st is written, pharmaceuticals will take a prominent place.
Yes, there’s the information technology revolution and jihad terrorism. But drugs — especially in America — have had a huge impact. The ubiquity of antidepressants; the slow but inexorable conquering of cancer; the miracle of effective HIV treatment; the huge boom in male potency drugs: all these have changed society, the economy and even our understanding of ourselves in previously unimaginable ways.
That’s just the legal part: what ecstasy has done to youth culture has yet to be fully understood. And in all this America’s vast multinationals have played a central role. Unhindered by the welfare states of Europe, America’s free market in pharmaceuticals has spawned an increasingly unrivalled revolution. As healthcare costs rise sharply and as regulation increases, the golden era may soon be over. But it was an impressive achievement while it lasted.
The current hot question is whether pharmaceuticals have also revolutionised sport. Yes, the crude days of East German steroid abuse are behind us. But the extremely sophisticated drugs now available to athletes — often designed to foil sporadic and half-hearted testing — have undoubtedly affected sport in ways often denied or simply overlooked.
But in the United States at least, denial is now no longer an option. In riveting leaks from court testimony several athletes have emerged as the alleged products not just of talent, energy and skill, but of chemicals too.
Marion Jones, for example, a woman with three gold medals at the Sydney Olympics, stands accused of steroid use by a powerful source, one Victor Conte, founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative. Conte says he dispensed drugs to Jones and even watched her inject them. Jones has always denied all the allegations and has never tested positive for any banned substances.
Barry Bonds, a leading baseball player, has now admitted using substances provided by Conte, substances that Bonds insists he did not know might be steroids.
Jones and Bonds are not minor figures. One has been pre-eminent in athletics; the other is a baseball legend. In fact, next year the baseball world will be watching to see whether Bonds can break Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs in his career, or Hank Aarons’s 755.
If Bonds pulls it off will his records be regarded as legitimate? Will Bonds go into the baseball Hall of Fame? Until recently there was barely any testing of baseball players for steroids. Even now the regime is far from rigorous. Bonds may not even have broken official rules at the time. Do the fans care? After all, it’s far more exciting a spectacle to see historic records smashed by a beefy miracle worker than to sit through another humdrum season in which mere mortals compete for honours.
America is going through yet another spasm of self-criticism, of course. The president used his last State of the Union address to inveigh against steroid use (to widespread ridicule at the time). Senator John McCain, his rival for the Republican nomination five years ago, has been loudly growling in congressional hearings.
But there is a slight sense of unreality to all this. Nobody who even glances at, say, the size of many American football players can doubt for a second that they have at some point had some chemical assistance. Human beings are simply not bred that big.
When the baseball star Jason Giambi doubled in size from one season to the next and subsequently deflated like a spent balloon what was any reasonable person to think had happened? Giambi has denied knowingly taking banned substances.
It’s estimated that up to 50% of baseball players get some sort of steroid enhancement. And you can see why. When an entire society uses drugs to get rid of wrinkles, remove the emotional ups and downs of life, maintain erections, sharpen memory, or stay awake, why wouldn’t sports figures take the hint? For them, after all, the extra edge doesn’t simply mean a better date on a Friday night or being able to cram for an exam more effectively. It can mean millions of dollars.
The health hazards are minor if the drugs are administered carefully and monitored by doctors.
Like marijuana use, which is widespread on American campuses (and was once all but mandatory), steroid use is popular among young athletes, or simply those in weight-training gyms who want to look bigger.
Steroids also took off among gay men during the Aids epidemic when they were prescribed for people with HIV-related testosterone deficiency. (For the record, I’ve been on testosterone therapy for almost seven years and I can testify to its rejuvenating powers.) Just look at the shifting physiques of the American male ideal. There isn’t an action hero in a movie today who doesn’t look monstrous compared with his peers in decades gone by. Even GI Joe toys have lats.
So ban? Or regulate? Or test more effectively? Or just give in? Sports purists rightly point out that in matters of, say, home runs, the historical record matters. It’s unfair for Bonds to claim to have beaten Babe Ruth’s record when he has an unfair advantage.
But what’s unfair? The nutrition that the average baseball player has enjoyed since birth today eclipses what players were used to in decades gone by. Equipment has changed. Expert training — the scientific honing of rest, nutrition, exercise — dwarfs the rudimentary techniques of past eras.
Many players also enjoy naturally higher levels of testosterone than others — why are those levels justifiable when created by the randomness of genes rather than by the craft of science? Steroids are not alien to the human body. They’re just sophisticated copies of hormones the body produces. They’re not so much unnatural as hyper-natural.
I wish I had a clear answer to these questions. But my discomfort with the chemically altered state of sports doesn’t have much logic to sustain it.
Yes, playing with an unfair advantage is unsportsmanlike. But why not then let everyone openly cut chemical corners rather than engage in the current hard-to-enforce duplicity and denial? We’ll see next baseball season just how much pharmaceutical shenanigans the US sports fan is willing to tolerate.
My bet is not much less than the shenanigans every American now deploys in his own life and his own body. In which case: pass the syringe.
