The Truth About Steroids And Sports

Steroids have been much in the news these days. And some of the best-known athletes have been or are about to be questioned about their alleged use of the drugs. So what is behind what seems the sports scandal of the decade? Our Sunday Morning Cover Story is reported now by Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN.

Congress has just opened a new round of hearings into the anabolic steroids debate.

Former Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch testified on Friday, "I want baseball to be clean."

Pitcher Roger Clemens is set to appear on Tuesday.

They're among a number of players facing questions over former Senator George Mitchell's recent report linking 89 major leaguers to performance-enhancing drugs.

So it makes you wonder: If steroids are such a problem, why do athletes continue to take them? Why are they are a problem even among high school athletes? Why are some entertainers said to be using them?

It's because, whatever you think, anabolic steroids work.

Barry Tyson uses steroids. But he's someone you won't see in the headlines. His usage is legit. Tyson takes steroids to help fight off infections from HIV.

How quickly did he notice a change? "I mean, did you, take this stuff at night and then in the morning say, 'Wow, something's already different'?" Gupta asked.

"Well, I mean, within a couple a days I noticed a change," Tyson said. "I noticed a change in my energy level. I noticed a change in my appetite. I noticed a change in how much I could push at the gym."

And how crucial were steroids in his recovery?

"It was very important especially because it's putting on that muscle that helps fight infection," Tyson said.

To understand anabolic steroids, let's take a look back: First developed in the 1930s, they're synthesized from the male hormone testosterone. They've been used to treat wasting conditions, like HIV-AIDS and cancer. They stimulate bone growth and appetite. But along the way, these useful drugs got hijacked.

"Like many things, the steroids were developed for a purpose, which is to treat people who had deficiency," said Dr. Jeffrey Lennox, an HIV-AIDS specialist at Emory University in Atlanta.

"And when people saw how much better people felt, that they put on muscle mass, that they got stronger because we were replacing the male hormones, athletes started to add additional hormones on top of their natural production and noticed increases in strength," Lennox said. "And, you know, it sort of ballooned from there."

In his book "Steroid Nation," Shaun Assael tells how steroids broke into the mainstream - from the Olympics, to the pros, to the gym around the corner.

"In the gyms of Venice Beach in the '70s, you saw bodybuilders - I called them in the book 'Arnold-istas,' people who are trying to follow Arnold Schwarzenegger,'" Assael said. "And they really tried to sort of create a religion around steroids."

Schwarzenegger, by the way, has admitted he used steroids back then.

In the 1980s, an infamous guide to the medication, the "Underground Steroid Handbook For Men And Women," was making the rounds.

"What they wrote about was every drug, what they could do for you, and where you could get it," Assael said. "And they advised the bodybuilders to go to 'friendly' doctors, young guys who kind of liked the gyms, too."

To this day, there's a thriving illicit trade in steroids, even though they're only legal with a prescription. And steroids have been joined by other performance-enhancing drugs, such as EPO, which increases your red blood cell count.

Then there's human growth hormone (HGH), derived from the pituitary gland.

They can all increase your strength, and endurance.

Still, they WON'T make you an instant super-athlete.

When it comes to being stronger, when it comes to being faster, when it comes to having better coordination, do steroids help with those things as well? No, said Assael.

"They're not going to help with your coordination," he told Gupta. "They're not going to help with your eyesight. They're not going to help you hit the ball. They'll help you hit the ball a little farther.

Of course, a lot of folks call that cheating.

Christopher Bell, a long-time weightlifter, has spent a lot of time thinking about the lure of steroids and sports ethics. He's also a filmmaker, and has just made a documentary called "Bigger Stronger Faster."

"When I was a kid, I was really into larger than life heroes: guys like Arnold, Hulk Hogan, Sylvester Stallone," Bell said.

In his film, he interviewed Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who was stripped of his Olympic gold medal in 1988 after failing a steroids test.

Chris Bell: Were you taking any sort of drugs for that race?
Ben Johnson: Not what they find me with, no.
Bell: But you were taking other stuff?
Johnson: Other stuff, yeah.
Bell: But isn't that still cheating?
Johnson: Still cheating, yeah, like everybody else.
Bell: So that's how you justify it, like everybody's cheating?
Johnson: Yes.

His brother Mark said, "In my mind there's no excuse for not being as strong as you can possibly be. You do what you gotta do to win."

"In 2004 Joe Biden was in front of Congress," recalled Christopher Bell, "and he was hitting his hands on the table, saying "there's something simply un-American about this." And when we started the film, I started thinking, is it really un-American to use steroids? Are me and my brothers un-American? Or is there nothing more American than doing whatever it takes to be the best, especially when you live in a culture that preaches to win at all costs?"

For himself, Christopher Bell says it was a decision he agonized over. "I tried steroids," he said. "But I felt so guilty I had to stop."

But Dr. Jeffrey Lennox says steroids will do more than just make you feel guilty: "Now the downside, obviously, is that there are the side effects. Your testes will shrink if you get too much. Your blood can become more coagulable or more likely to clot. And there's always the risk of, you know, heart weakening and liver tumors."

The sports world was stunned over the death of Lyle Alzado, the fearsome football star of the 1970s and '80s. He believed that heavy steroid use led to the brain tumor that killed him. There was no medical evidence to back that up.

There IS evidence that steroids can stunt the growth of teenagers, which is one reason why there's so much concern over steroid use by high school athletes.

A recent survey of high school seniors found that, while a small number admitted to using steroids, a much larger number - about 40-percent - said steroids are 'fairly easy' or 'very easy' to get.

Just this past month, Illinois said it will begin to test high school athletes for steroids, joining Texas, New Jersey and Florida.

So what to do about this good drug gone bad?

A lot of folks feel that if anything's going to turn steroids back into drugs that help sick people, instead of helping athletes get an extra edge, it might not be testing, or Congress, or warnings about side effects.

Shaun Assael believes it might come down to a simple question: "You as the athlete have in your mind how you want to be remembered. That's why you put yourself through such excruciating pain day in and day out to get there. And if that legacy is on the line, if the political winds turn, and suddenly anybody associated with these things are looked at as bad people, in an era of cheating, that's the deterrent."

But will it ever be that simple? We posed the question to Dr. Lennox. In his answer we found the promise, and the curse, of steroids:

"It's a difficult decision. I mean, I'm a physician. You know, if I was 30 years younger and I was being recruited to be in the major leagues and they said, 'You know, you just don't have the strength; if you could hit it ten more yards, we'd take you to the majors,' I might make a very different decision.

"I might say, "Well, I'm gonna use the steroids and just hope I don't get caught."