December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVE KETTMANN
ON Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco sentenced Barry Bonds, Major League
Baseball’s career home run leader, to two years of probation and community
service. Mr. Bonds’s success in baseball, and his conviction for obstruction of
justice earlier this year, both stemmed in part from his use of a
testosterone-based balm famously known as “the cream.”
But in the more than eight years since Mr. Bonds was first accused of using
performance-enhancing drugs, something strange has happened: millions of men
have started to use “the cream,” too — or one of any number of similar
treatments to make themselves look and feel younger and stronger.
According to reliable estimates, total testosterone prescriptions have
skyrocketed, from 1.75 million in 2002 to 4.5 million last year. The demand,
said John Hoberman, author of “Testosterone Dreams,” isn’t limited to would-be
pro athletes; it extends to “police officers, bouncers, biker gangs and the
‘anti-aging’ industry that provides legal prescriptions to millions of older
males.”
Too often, the Steroid Era in baseball turned into a game of sanctimony and
whodunit, distracting from the more important question of why we, as a culture,
want our athletes comic-book pumped up and artificially enhanced. And it helped
us avoid recognizing that, from Hollywood actors on human growth hormone, to
weekend athletes, to men in their 40s or 50s or beyond who just want to feel
less blah because of “low T,” we are on the cusp of an Age of Juicing.
It’s as if we’ve all stepped into Jose Canseco’s world. The retired baseball
player opened his 2005 book “Juiced,” a No. 1 New York Times best seller (which
I ghost wrote), by predicting that the use of steroids and other enhancements by
athletes was a precursor to widespread use among the general population.
“I have no doubt whatsoever that intelligent, informed use of steroids, combined
with human growth hormone, will one day be so accepted that everybody will be
doing it,” Mr. Canseco said. “We will be able to look good and have strong, fit
bodies well into our sixties and beyond. It’s called evolution, and there’s no
stopping it.”
What’s behind this explosion? A change in medical opinion, for one thing. New
research has cast doubt on claims that low-level testosterone supplements pose a
health risk for men, specifically regarding links between prostate cancer and
high testosterone levels. That opened the door for doctors to start recommending
treatments to a wider range of patients, just as it loosened the floodgates for
drug companies to start pushing them.
“Over the last five years the market for prescriptions for testosterone products
has been one of the biggest growth areas for the pharmaceutical industry,”
Abraham Morgentaler, an associate clinical professor of urology at Harvard
Medical School and author of “Testosterone for Life,” said in a phone interview.
And, to be fair, there is a medical justification for many of the prescriptions.
“There are still millions of men in this country who have symptoms and signs of
testosterone deficiency who are not diagnosed or treated and should be,” Dr.
Morgentaler said.
But the medical establishment wouldn’t have had much luck had demand not spiked
as well. In a way, the juicing scandals in sports served as a perverse
advertisement for the drugs’ effectiveness. We saw the home-run totals, we saw
the muscles and we saw the guys who looked as if they were having a whale of a
good time with their Adonis bodies — until they pushed it too far and started
looking ridiculous, like Barry Bonds, whom one insider dubbed “the Michelin Man”
for his bulging neck.
The truth is that a big part of steroids’ attraction was always mental. Jason
Giambi, an admitted juicer who now plays for the Colorado Rockies, once told me
the key to being a big-league hitter was to “feel sexy” up at home plate, and he
meant it far more literally than I understood at the time. Extra testosterone
does a lot for the body, but it also gives an athlete a feeling of being
unstoppable, of having an edge, of feeling, well, sexy. It’s this feeling that
many men at home watching “low T” ads during the recent baseball playoffs want
for themselves.
It’s not just sports. People laughed when Sylvester Stallone was arrested in
Australia in 2007 for trying to transport his personal stash of growth hormone,
but its use is reportedly widespread among actors of a certain age looking to
keep a youthful appearance.
Of course, millions of men (and women) remain, to say the least, wary of such
treatments. Dr. Morgentaler, a self-described testosterone skeptic when he began
researching it more than 20 years ago who later became an advocate, believes
that the stigma was created unfairly. “People have the idea that stuff is
illicit and illegal and dangerous,” he said. “But really the story in sports is
that it’s against the rules of whatever game it is.”
He has a point. But I remember interviewing an East German athlete outside a
Berlin courtroom in 1999. She was one of many plaintiffs in a case against
Manfred Ewald, the former East German sports boss, who had given orders to give
underage female athletes large doses of steroids without their knowledge,
leading to a wide array of health problems, including giving birth to babies
with club feet. “Steroids are a time bomb,” she said. “They are always
dangerous. I would tell athletes around the world, ‘Keep yourself off steroids.’
”
Then again, there’s a difference between sluggers shooting themselves up to
reach testosterone levels 50 times above normal — consequences be damned — and
low-level supplements that can improve quality of life with a minimum of health
risk.
My real worry, though, is cultural. Just as group pressure led ballplayers to
juice to keep up with the competition, might not the “low T” mind-set push men
to juice up, even if a little slowing down with age might in fact be natural?
Dr. Morgentaler told me about men he treated who no longer had that burning
drive to run out and sell another client, all because of low testosterone.
But is that so bad? Do we really want to feed a business culture that
increasingly elevates cocksure confidence and pushiness above all else,
especially if it filters into everyday life?
In an era marked by the dangerous decisions of an entire industry full of
gung-ho alpha males, shouldn’t we be wary of a culture that pushes us even
further in that direction? Maybe some quiet time for reflection or awareness of
the consequences of one’s actions might not be so bad — even if it means a
little lower T.
