To a sports fan, it might seem as if with every news broadcast comes another suspension; some athlete, old or young, loses half of his or her season after failing a drug test. In professional sports, where job performance is the primary factor in an athlete’s salary and is practically the only aspect of the athlete that sports fans and owners care about, many professional athletes turn to performance enhancing drugs to gain a competitive edge. One sport in particular that has been overwhelmed with the use of performance enhancing drugs, commonly referred to as PEDs, is Major League Baseball, or the MLB. The issue of PEDs in the MLB has been a long-lasting one, and several of the most famous names in baseball, such as Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, …show more content…
He asserts that this system should be removed entirely. He supports this by pointing out that the main reason PEDs are banned is because “they give users an unfair advantage over the rest of the field,” but if the MLB allowed every player to use them, then no player would have any advantage. He argues that legalizing PEDs would also benefit the MLB “from a business standpoint.” The MLB would no longer need to carefully monitor players for usage and more people would be interested in following the sport, and both of these would lead to an increase in revenue. He also anticipates objections to his argument when he acknowledges that people will argue that the PEDs will cause health issues with athletes. He responds by arguing that athletes already “undertake serious health risks by simply walking onto the field . . .” Smith ultimately concludes that if athletes are willing to use the drugs, then it would behoove the public to make them legal and make baseball more exciting. I intend to use Smith’s arguments to show that legalizing PEDs in baseball might not be as ludicrous as it initially seems and to provide several reasons for why people believe that PEDs should be …show more content…
The subjects of their test were forty men from ages nineteen to forty with standard body weights, who had experience with lifting weights. These forty men were randomly placed into four groups: a placebo and no-exercise group, a testosterone and no-exercise group, a placebo and exercise group, and a testosterone and exercise group. The doses given to each subject as well as the amount of exercise of each individual were closely monitored. The test ran for ten weeks, and the body compositions, muscle sizes, and muscle strength of the men were then analyzed. The negative side effects of the testosterone during the testing were limited and minor. Despite all having similar body types before the experiment, the men in the testosterone and exercise group had by far the largest increase in muscle size, and, likewise, the testosterone and exercise group showed the greatest increase in the amount they could squat and bench press. These results conclusively show that the effects of PEDs, such as testosterone doses, are obvious and significant. I plan to use the results from this journal to exhibit that PEDs provide a clear advantage for the athletes that abuse