If you had the choice of a normal life or one which involved money, fame and plenty of sex, which would you choose?
As an ignorant and inept US congress - flooded with lobbying dollars from the pharmaceutical industry – made its way through an ill-informed hunt against steroid and human growth hormone use in baseball last week. Steven Well discusses the concept of the recently published book Steroid Nationby Shaun Assael.
Assael’s Steroid Nation has brilliantly anatomized the American obsession with body and muscle enhancing drugs. This book is a required read for those interested in the truth about modern day sport in the US- unhindered and unvarnished truth- And how could it not be? It’s the classic American drug story following Blow, Nikki Sixx’s autobiography and the Hunter S Thompson story. It stars a rebel freak bodybuilder chemist outlaws who, operate in garages and basements, filled with shoeboxes stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, experimenting on the fanatical “Arnoldista” chemical on the kamikazes of the Californian bodybuilding scene, many of whom were selling their bodies and making gay porn videos to support their habits.
It’s not your average book. At one point steroid guru Dan Duchaine gives his bodybuilder girlfriend a massive dose of DNP, a chemical similar to the high explosive TNT. The chapter concludes on a dark note by adding: “Dan Duchaine’s third wife was in England trying to recover from the brain damage he had caused. Now the woman he wanted to replace her, a woman he had promised prize-winning legs, was about to have one of them sawed off.” If Steroid Nation restricted itself to bodybuilding it would be little more than a freak peep show. However it nothing of the sort- It archives how steroids and human growth hormones entered mainstream sports. It flatly states that cycling, athletics, baseball and American football are awash with performance-enhancing drugs at all levels and have been for decades. (evident examples- Marion Jones and Clemens). Even though the sport millionaires pinned on every street and billboard are in fact drug junkies does not side track from their rock’n’roll story. Why should it? Do you think any less of The Beatles for knowing they recorded Sgt Pepper’s off their tits on hash and acid? Example of this can be seen of American football legend and infamous steroid user Lyle Alzado “undergoing radiation therapy and wearing a black eye patch to stop the dizzy spells” flinging open his front door in a rage, swearing at the subpoena-bearing, 110-pound female deputy standing on his doorstep, stumbling, and then getting a entire can of Mace in the face.
While adequately recounting the inadequate and inept attempts to police steroid use, (with its uncanny similarities to the wider but equally inept War on Drugs) – Steroid nation offers no solutions.
According to Wells here are the following possible solutions:
Solution one: continue with the current inept prohibitionist farce where steroid-using individual athletes are crucified on a regular basis while administrators and owners get away scot free. And journalists are complicit in selling the myth that it’s just a matter of kicking a few unnaturally swollen snakes out of the sporting garden of Eden. (Is there, for instance, anyone who seriously thinks that all the bodies on display at the Rugby World Cup were achieved “naturally”? Or that rugby league has had problems with drugs but union hasn’t? Really? So why the silence?)
Solution two: legalization; Athletes will take anything that gives them an edge. And for all the why-oh-why editorials and the hand-wringing of hard-core baseball stat freaks (who are piqued to the point of ripping tissues that today’s testosterone-pumped monsters are smashing the sacred records set by the matchstick-limbed and pot-bellied gods of yore), en masse the fans don’t give a damn. MLB attendances are at record levels. The NFL is bigger, faster, more bitch-titted and more popular than ever. The pro-wrestling circuit – where nobody thinks the physiques are natural any more than they think the fights are unscripted – still attracts massive audiences. And the biggest US TV hit of the season is the relaunch of the tanned, shaven, huge and superbly-muscled American Gladiators.
So they take the drugs. Of course they do. And for that kind of offer, so would you
