Performance Enhancing Drugs in Professional Sports

As an employee of a sports entity and a fan of sports for the majority of my short life, I have an unshakable belief of the rampant usage of performance enhancing drugs throughout the professional sphere of sports and beyond. I, like most around me, take a hard lined, politically correct approach against such widespread cheating. There is a real and immediate advantage coupled with long term consequences.

Baseball is a sport that has been at the center of PED's for a little over the past decade. While there have been strong improvements relative to other professional sports there is still a long way to go. By rough estimations from people I've talked to it would not surprise me if anywhere from 40-75% of players are still using performance enhancers to recover quickly. Whether that is cynical or realistic I cannot say, but I'm inclined to go with the latter.

A while back I read a Bill Simmons article on his take of PED's in professional sports. One point I would like to latch on to is the fact that there is no leading figure among the clean players who is taking a stand against those that are dirty. An example I would like to see is Derek Jeter. Hardly a guy who would be using drugs, which is made more obvious by his lengthy return from injury, he should be the figure head for a campaign against PED's in baseball. If I'm Derek Jeter or anyone like him and I've gotten to the place I have the right way I want to punish those who have cheated to get there or stay there. The problem being that his peers and co-workers would likely ostracize him or anyone else who used their voice to try and clean up the game.

The worst part of it all is that I think a lot of guys coming up through the ranks of professional baseball feel forced to take steroids or other performance enhancers just to keep up. The way the game is now in order to compete you have to be dirty or an unnatural specimen to begin with. Not only is it terrible that one feels he has to cheat to compete, but the things he has to do to his body and the detrimental effects seen later in life, which could be avoided if the game were cleaned up.

I don't know if it can be done, and I admire Bud Selig for trying, but it always seems like the cheaters are a step ahead of the good guys. Unless the veterans, the clean ones, the ones who've done it the right way stand up to stigmatize the behavior and police their own clubhouses it will be a long time before were back to a level playing field.