Baseball Reminder: Steroids Are Very Important

By Spencer Hall
To reiterate a question that needs to be reasked: What possible purpose does the Congressional investigation serve in the national interest?
Without getting overly political, if possible, consider the situation: Congress, with massive deficits and two ongoing wars overseas to look after, devotes committee time to examining the ultimately circumstantial evidence turned over by a trainer who was caught on audio obviously begging Roger Clemens for hush money.
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All to ferret out alleged users of illegal drugs whose long- term effects are not properly understood by science, and whose exact risks according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse include “not wearing a helmet on a motorcycle.” (In all seriousness: They include that in the secondary risks of steroid use in their report.)
Don’t take this as an endorsement of steroids, or of steroid use, but by the government’s own estimates, steroids rank below marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, PCP, LSD, and pretty much any other drug in terms of enforcement priority. In fact, just try to find a death directly attributable to steroid use, and you’ll have trouble turning up more than a few isolated cases of steroid overdose--and even then, there’s many, many other substances involved. (See: Chris Benoit.)
In addition to this, the “steroid problem” in professional baseball is a slight one: under reinforced testing, three players were caught in the year 2007. That is a blip on the radar, not an epidemic of any proportion.
Oh, and no one in the baseball fanbase seems to care if players shoot horse hormones into their jugulars, either, right? Because profits soared during the so-called “Steroid Era,” and even if Bonds and other prominent players took illegal steroids, is it really within Congressional purview to assume investigative duties reserved for local law enforcement? Or efficient, for that matter?
So again: finding out if Roger Clemens put a needle in his butt is in the national interest, right? Right? Just wanted to be clear on this before the meter continues to run on the taxpayers’ dime. How’s Iraq going? Peachy, right?↵