MADISON, Wis. — How can the accomplishments of Bonds, McGwire, Sosa and others of the “steroid era” of baseball be compared to those of Aaron or Ruth? Can Major League Baseball and the National Football League and the others ever get drugs out of their systems? Will the athletes named as users in the Mitchell report face futures threatened by cancer, heart attack, stroke? What will come of the House committee hearings, now postponed until February? Is there any tarnish remover strong enough to put the shine back on sports in America?
As the controversy over use of anabolic steroids by athletes swirls like a wind-whipped snowstorm, Norman Fost, professor of pediatric medicine and director of the Program in Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, is a center of calm and certainty. He says, as he has for many years and virtually alone, that the maelstrom is nothing more than “the hypocrisy, bad facts, inconsistency and moral incoherence of anti-drug hysteria.”