Slippery Slopes and Tipping Points

Malcolm Gladwell blogs in defense of baseball players who claim they only used Human Growth Hormone to get over injuries:

"Let's assume, for a moment, that what Vina said was true--that he only took HGH because he was trying to recover from an injury. Let's assume the same of Pettitte and Bennett. I think we can also agree that there is reasonable evidence that Human Growth Hormone speeds recovery.

So what, exactly, is wrong with an athlete--someone who makes a living with their body--taking medication to speed their recovery from injury? Is it wrong to take ibruprofen? Is it wrong to ice a sore elbow? For that matter, is it ethical or even legal for Major League Baseball--or indeed any employee or governing body--to deny an employee access to a potentially beneficial medical treatment?" [More]

Well, is it wrong for a ballplayer to hang out with professional gamblers and bookies? Is it wrong for him to bet on sports other than baseball? Is it wrong for him to bet on other baseball teams, but not his own? Is it wrong for him to bet on his own team to win? Is it wrong for him to bet on his own team to lose? Is it wrong for him to throw games, like the 1919 Black Sox?

The last is catastrophic to the welfare of baseball, so to minimize temptation, the game has walked its rules about betting a long way back up the slippery slope.

Similarly, once players start taking HGH to help them over nagging injuries (and all players over a certain age, and probably all starting pitchers of any age, have nagging ailments), how likely is it that they will stop? Why not keep going with the HGH until your head has swelled up to Barry Bonds's current size and you're trashing the record book by setting the all time mark for career homers?

By the way, the reason I've always been more interested in the impact of steroids than in Human Growth Hormone is because steroids are sex hormones, and thus provide unnatural experiments in the biological differences between the sexes. They are called "anabolic steroids" because they try to remove the other virilizing effects besides muscle-building, but they still have other side effects. Of course, products like the synthetic testosterone that Andrew Sullivan takes are even more closely related to natural male hormones in effect.

In contrast, Human Growth Hormone isn't as interesting as a test of, say, feminist theory.

By the way, I tend to believe Yankee pitcher Andy Pettite's claim that he only briefly used HGH. The product tends to make your jaw swell up, and Pettite has the kind of particularly narrow face on which the effects would be most visible.

It seemed fairly likely at the 1996 Olympics that veteran superstar Carl Lewis had gone on HGH because his normally clean-cut features [1992 photo] were suddenly ridiculously misshapen [1996] -- he looked like a squirrel carrying nuts in his cheeks. My wife and I saw Carl on TV recently, and she was shocked at how his face had gone a long way back to its original form.

Lots of sprinters during the 1990s who were in their 20s and even 30s suddenly got orthodontic braces on their teeth, because their faces were changing shape due to HGH, causing their teeth to point in weird directions. There weren't HGH tests in the 1990s, so it was a popular alternative.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer