ENGLISH PAPER

Submitted By shaunmarmin
Words: 2305
Pages: 10
Open Document
Ryan Minniti
Professor Comerford
English 115
11/21/2014
Steroids: The Misunderstood Super-Drug Imagine a pill or injection that could give you everything you ever wanted. “If there was a drug available to allow a journalist win the Pulitzer or to allow me to win the Nobel Prize, I pretty well think we would be injecting that drug on the steps at Old Main, here at Penn State” (“National…”). We all have a dream, something we want more than anything else in the world. Most of us would do just about anything to realize that dream. So we can sympathize with athletes when they take steroids. They are trying to achieve what they want most in the world. Whether it be making it to a professional sport, or if they are already a professional then it’s being the greatest to ever play the game. We should legalize steroids because they will be in sports regardless, athletes can pick and choose what they want in their bodies, “roid rage” does not exist, “fairness” and “ethicality” are uneducated assumptions, we can make them safer, and increase education for athletes on how much to take and when. Anabolic steroids are synthetic, or man-made, versions of the hormone testosterone. What is commonly unknown about steroids, however, is that the human body produces them every single day. During the day, your body produces catabolic steroids in the form of the hormone cortisol. Cortisol suppresses your muscles and breaks them down throughout the day. When you go to bed at night, your body produces anabolic steroids in the form of testosterone. Testosterone rebuilds your muscles and makes them stronger than they once were. So why do athletes take steroids? While you are exercising or competing, your body produces a compound called gluco-corticoid. Similarly to cortisol, gluco-corticoid suppresses your muscles and breaks them down, causing them to not reach their full potential. This also reduces the testosterone levels in your body to that of a castrated man. Your body has ten times the amount of gluco-corticoid than it does testosterone. In turn, athletes take steroids to promote more testosterone production while they exercise or compete. This gives the muscles their maximum potential, thus making the athlete perform better and recover quicker (“National…”). One fact we need to get over as a society is that steroids are here to stay. Dr. Bennett Foddy, who works in the Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, says, “It would be much easier to eliminate the anti-doping rules than to eliminate doping. The current policy against doping has proved expensive and difficult to police. In the near future it may become impossible to police” (Foddy). It will be impossible to police because athletes will always find a new drug to mask the steroids. Last year in the NFL it was Adderall. According to Richard Sherman, a defensive back for the Seattle Seahawks, about half of these players were coming away from drug tests with high levels of Adderall, just so happens that these players were some of the best players in the league, including Mike Neal, an outside linebacker for the Green Bay Packers (Copeland). When the NFL finds a way around Adderall, players will find a different drug to skew the results. It’s a constantly repeating cycle. Who are we to tell athletes what to do with their bodies? As Lewis Kurlantzick, a Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law, said, "Athletes are in a position to make a decision about what behavior is in their best interest, to weigh the risks and benefits according to their own values” (Kurlantzick). These men and women are adults, well into their twenties. Their brains are fully developed and they understand the risk of what they are putting into their bodies. It is a risk they are willing to take in order to become the best athlete they can be in their individual sport. One risk we all seem to get stuck on in the
Show More

Related Documents: ENGLISH PAPER

English Paper

Imagination is a big part of lives As a young kid we all imagine or make believe things that are not real, are real. There isn’t anything wrong with making believe or pretending. Pretending or imagining things as a kid can be a great way for the mind to be stimulated it can show where a child’s head is at. We should continue to let our kids imagine, and pretend. What can we learn from using our imagination is learning who we are as people? What we like to do or how creative we can be. We can…

Words 638 - Pages 3

English Paper

Pregame Prayer in Today’s Youth The smell of fresh cut green grass. Dirt from the infield spread evenly over the diamond shaped field from first base across to third base. The freshly cooked scent of goodies from the food stand, getting ready for the start of the game that is about to start. On the outfield grass in the distance, there are about six baseball players from the home team who know they are about to get part of their uniform dirty and they all start to kneel down to one knee. With the…

Words 1245 - Pages 5

English Paper

Writers and speakers have a large impact on the ideas and opics people consider to be inethical or unfair. People are able to convince others, whether through speech or writing about their ideas. During he mid 19th century and mid 20th century there were laws that caused problems for certian people, like women, blacks, and other minorities. Just like today people spoke out against those problems they were facing and pushed for others to see what their potential could be without these things limiting…

Words 355 - Pages 2

English Paper

Tara Nemec Eric Schmitt English 1001 12 November 2009 Animals Used For Clothing Attending the zoo when you were a child was the best day ever at the time. You would walk in and see glass cages with different kinds of animals to your left and your right with all kinds of vegetation, each satisfying the needs of that animal. You would run up to the cage, face squished up against the glass and just stare at them for minutes in amazement even if they were just sleeping or sitting still. You…

Words 1405 - Pages 6

English Paper

Annotations for To Kill A Mocking Bird 1. Diction Chapter 1, Pg. 6 “Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence… I did not miss her, but I think Jem did. He remembered her clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then go off and play by himself behind the car-house. When he was like that, I knew better than to bother him.” This quote shows that Jem and Scout are motherless but have their maid Calpurnia and that their father, Atticus was wifeless…

Words 4875 - Pages 20

English Paper

Tanner Shaffer Mr. Fox English 11/21/13 Buddhism is a religion most common in Asia. The history of Buddhism is one of rich morals and learning from experience to ultimately be enlightened. Siddhartha Gautama is the main character in the stories of how Buddhism came about. He was a young prince who challenged and questioned what the goal in life is. So he set out into the Asian countryside trying and learning different techniques adopted by the priests and holy men he met. Soon he fou…

Words 439 - Pages 2

English Paper

Warren Christopher believes that humans need to be able to depend on and trust one another, he shared with us three examples to illustrate his beliefs. He tells us how he once was driving down a two-lane highway at sixty miles an hour, and on the opposite side of the road, another car was approaching him around the same speed. He looked at the drivers eyes for just a second, and wondered if the driver depended on him, like he did on the driver. Even though no words were heard or spoken, they both…

Words 538 - Pages 3

English Paper

Comedic Review for Jo Koy In Jo Koy’s new Comedy Central special, “Don’t Make Him Angry”, he builds his material on typical stereotype humor yet adds playful ties with familial additions from his own daily experiences. Jo Koy doesn’t shy away from his Filipino heritage. Contrastingly to many other comedic genres, Jo koy addresses more detrimental issues like raising kids. All of these comedic topics are executed in Jo Koy’s great method of character portrayal through voices and gestures. Unlike…

Words 1709 - Pages 7

English Paper

Perry and Maier both believed in the historical history of the bible but they had different points of views. In the readings from Perry there was a statements made on page 36 that seemed or sound as though he don't entirely believe or agree with all the bible in tell. I totally disagree when Perry stated that the bible contains factual errors, folklore and legends. Do to the fact that from the Book of Genesis stated that God created everything from the heavens and the earth to light, life and humans…

Words 332 - Pages 2

ENGLISH PAPER

Lab Report 1 In this lab report we will be conducting an experiment to test for cellular respiration in germination. When germination occurs cellular respiration provides plants with the ATP needed to produce all the molecules that they require to grow. So in the experiment that follows serves for the purpose of measuring the amount of oxygen uptake and use that as proof that germinating soy beans are in fact carrying on cellular respiration. My hypothesis of course being that soybeans do in fact…

Words 461 - Pages 2