Steroid hysteria is presented at its finest in ESPN Columnist Howard Bryant’s book on the anabolic steroids in baseball scandal entitled “Juicing the Game.” Howard Bryant is an extremely talented writer with an unparalleled understanding and knowledge of the history of major league baseball. Unfortunately, his outstanding expertise in baseball history is countered by a surprisingly uninformed understanding of anabolic steroids. Bryant even glorifies Rep. Henry Waxman as a hero of the steroids in baseball era even though Waxman is completely ignorant when it comes to steroids.

Howard Bryant’s attempt to weave a narrative out of his passion for baseball and the obviously foreign world of steroids could have benefitted from considerable more steroid research. But only an exceptional writer like Howard Bryant could create such masterfully written steroid hysteria with such disturbingly false information as follows.

Despite the disagreement, virtually all doctors, Crusaders or not, could agree that anabolic steroids were lethal to the human system. They were certain that some of the more powerful steroids, such as Deca-durabolin, Winstrol, and stanozolol, were major threats to the heart, the liver, and the kidneys. Deca-durabolin, for example, was a particularly nasty steroid that had been in use among weightlifters since the 1960s. Users of the powerful yet lethal drug were highly susceptible to kidney malfunction and liver and pituitary tumors. To Robert Cantu, the noted Boston neurosurgeon who specialized in catastrophic sports injury, athletes were involved in a high-stakes poker game, in which the odds were against them and the risks were chilling. While most people knew that steroids could cause sterility, Cantu believed it to be less known that the drugs could affect the reproductive systems of a user’s children and grandchildren. That athletes were now willing to risk the future health of their unborn children for a big payday raised the stakes even further. (emphasis added)

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