Stéroides anabolisants & Suicide - A Review of the Evidence - Articles and Blog

Cette semaine, my friend sent me two awesome articles about anabolic steroids. The first was AAS and Suicide: A Brief Review of the Evidence.

AAS and Suicide: A Brief Review of the Evidence

by Jack Darkes, Ph.d.
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology;
Director of Interventions, Alcohol and Substance Use Research Institute
University of South Florida

Discussions of the potential role of anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) in suicide surfaced recently when AAS and their use among professional athletes were blamed for several suicides of young adult males. These allegations inspired a congressional investigation and renewed anti-steroid rhetoric, but little dispassionate evaluation. The testimony of experts and grieving parents notwithstanding, the role of AAS in suicide is not clear.

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The second article was an open letter to the Members of the House Committee on Government Reform on the Recent Hearings and Legislation on the Use of Anabolic Steroids in Sports.

An Open Letter to the Members of the House Committee on Government Reform on the Recent Hearings and Legislation on the Use of Anabolic Steroids in Sports

by Philip Sweitzer, J.D.

It is time for some difficult truth telling. That is the purpose of this letter: to force confrontation of the evidence, much of which Congress seems to want to avoid in a perpetuation of "war on drugs" hype and hypocrisy. The March 17, 2005 hearings before the House Committee on Government Reform showed Congress at its worst, the poison of loaded rhetoric dripping from every turn of phrase. "Illegal" was a favorite word throughout the proceeding. So were the terms "teenagers" and "idolize" and "faith." In the hands of a politician, those are all terms of art. They make simple issues of the complex, reduce the need for scientific justification for policy that should be inherently scientific, rather than being based on more generalized moral notions of "cheating."

Unsurprisingly, therefore, not only was truth-telling not the proceeding’s goal; plutôt, it wasn’t even a desired effect. This was pure advertising, pure "war on drugs" marketing hype, pure pandering to the political constituencies. With Social Security reform dead in the water, the president’s poll numbers plummeting, the war in Iraq going badly, and a growing "public suspicion" of Congress’s penchant for injecting itself into intensely personal and private matters - the moralizing over steroids in sports was ill-timed and ill-conceived, to say the very least. At worst, it represented a subversion of congressional authority, because it based legislative policy on known misrepresentations of scientific fact.