Confessions of a Juicer: Reconsidering the War on Steroids

In his latest column for The Daily Beast, The RP takes a controversial position on Big Sport’s War on Steroids — he claims that anti-PED hysteria is misplaced, hypocritical and completely ineffective.  And his viewpoint is very personal.  Read an excerpt:

I’m coming clean: I use performance enhancing drugs.

Indeed, I’ve had a serious testosterone problem.

Of course, unlike my fellow Jewish recovering politicians (ahem…Mssrs. Spitzer, Weiner and Filner), my body doesn’t produce enough of the über-manly hormone.  A few years ago, I was diagnosed with a free testosterone level akin to an octogenarian eunuch. Who’d been dead for a decade.

The option of traditional testosterone therapy, however, frankly frightened me.  I’d heard the woeful tales of back acne, hair in strange places, ‘roid rage, the link to prostate cancer. I also remember vividly football superstar Lyle Alzado‘s final days, blaming his brutal death from brain cancer on PED overuse. And as an ESPN Radio addict, I’d been bombarded for years by its omnipresent, perversely mixed messages:  the screaming sports host anti-steroid hysteria, interrupted every twenty minutes by snake-oily “Low T” elixir ads, using the kind of incredulous performance hype that would discomfit even Bernie Madoff.

So I tried an alternative route — medically-sanctioned natural vitamins and minerals, prescribed by a well-respected M.D., whose practice focused on integrative health.

Nothing. And I was suffering.

While our sex-obsessed culture focuses on the libido-suppressing side effects of a “Low T” diagnosis, the ramifications for me were quite more significant.  My immune system was shot; my body had become a petri dish for every new virus of the week.  Worse, my mood and energy levels had plummeted:  Despite enjoying perhaps the happiest and most successful years of my life, there were far too many mornings when I struggled simply to get out of bed.

Click here to read the full piece.