* I remember Star Trek: The Next Generation had an episode where there was a brief throwaway when a character was forced to view warriors through the ages, and the one from 21st-Century Earth (which was the then-future) had steroids in his suit that he snuffed periodically.
Pretty prescient? Or did they just assume that, just as every warrior in history used mind-altering substances to go into battle (spoiler: most of them were drunk), the guys at Star Trek thought the army would just weaponize the tradition and give guys stuff that would scientifically make them fight better?
Anyway, U.S. cops are asked to do way more these days than any cops in the past. Lots of stress.
Policing in the U.S. once took one of two roles: either you were a small-town constable who knew everyone and therefore had little crime to take care of, or, you were in a big city with lots of crime, but you were at least allowed free range to bash skulls in of anyone you thought was bad and never got in trouble for it.
Nowadays, cops have the problem of being handicapped because they don’t know the communities and they are supposed to both delay any action that a normal human would (like bashing a skull of a dirtbag) and then be able to respond quickly enough to defend yourself and innocents when the dirtbag pushes it and gets to the point of killing.
All this on a 12 hour shift.
* It’s not only cops. There’s plenty of ordinary people on steroids. Surely about 90% of people who lift weights do steroids, though they won’t admit it. Roid rage is a real problem today.
In a previous job, I had a weight -lifting boss who was abusing steroids and he was a real pain in the neck to deal with. He would have uncontrollable fits of anger when you merely disagreed with him. He would shout and curse like a teenager throwing a temper tantrum. A sight pathetic to behold on a mature man. Like most steroid abusers, he was in love with himself, with his own ripped body. I guess 20 years down the line he will discover his inner woman and turn into a granny tranny like Bruce Jenner.
*( Steroids as “judgment-altering substances” is pretty funny. There’s not much science behind the roid rage stuff. There was a big study on anabolic steroids and aggression in Swedish men. The interesting thing there is the higher correlation between other drugs and steroid use. In other words, users of steroids are going to be using other things too, which probably are the source of aggressive behavior.
My guess is outfits like Blackwater hand out greenies like chewing gum. Maybe that’s true with cops too. Athletes and body builders like greenies as a pre-workout/pre-game supplement. MLB testing for amphetamines has probably done more to fix baseball than steroid testing. There’s a long tradition of using amphetamines in pro-sports for obvious reasons.
From what I gather, football players are now using Adderall as they can get scripts and a waiver from the NFL, claiming a medical need.
* Anabolic steroids should just be legal. They have many advantages with responsible use.
We live in a gynocentric society, and making testosterone shots illegal while handing out estrogen pills like M&M’s is a straightforward sign of that. Masculine countries, like most E.E. and Middle East countries, have no controls on it. Anomalously, the U.K. also has legal over-the-counter steroids, and wow, their society is not torn about by an epidemic of ‘roid abuse.
* I watched the transformation from the old bloated sometimes drunk cops of my youth in the 80s to the jacked up roid users common today. Steroids became widespread and were still legal when they started to change. The boys who used them are two of the three types of boys who later become cops — the insecure ones and the ones who like smacking people around. The more demanding physicals also encourage it. Now, they justify it by believing it might save their life, which may be true. The same goes for prison guards, who are usually either too big to pass the cop physical or too crazy to pas the psych. I can see positive and negative consequences.
* The series A Football life just rebroadcast an hour show on the life of Lyle Alzado. Steroids made him great for 16 years.
* A very good piece on this is “A Football Life, Lyle Alzado”. No discussion on PED is complete unless all the contestants have seen this video. It’s on NFL.com. Rags-to-riches-to dead, brought to you by PED. There is always a piper to be paid. Lyle only damaged other football players, who always wind up damaged and thrown away in exchange for cash and prizes anyway. Football-Fodder.
The tragedy of our police on PED is, on the way to a cop’s death-by-Roids, the oft-lethal attitude, the anger, the approach on every citizen in the simplest of interactions as combative and adversarial. And that friends, gets people dead. Cops already aren’t the brightest of folks, when you add in the steroids, when you equip these bovine nitwits with the best killing gear the American taxpayer can buy, you have what we have, cops killing a lot of citizens in everyday transactions that oughtn’t have been.
* What happens is that your pituitary gland is constantly monitoring the level of various substances and hormones in your blood stream and sending chemical signals to various organs to stimulate or depress their activity in order to regulate the level of these substances. When the level of androgens in your blood stream rises the pituitary glands secretes hormones to depress testicular activity. The pituitary gland doesn’t know that the source of excess androgen level is exogenous. What would normally happen if androgen levels in the blood stream rose above what the pituitary wants it to be is that the hormones secreted by the pituitary gland would depress the level of testicular activity returning androgen levels to normal. Then the pituitary gland would cut back on hormones to depress testicular activity. If androgen levels were lower than normal the pituitary gland secretes hormones to raise the level of testicular activity.
If androgens are being supplied exogenously the androgen level does not fall and the pituitary gland simply produces more hormone to shut down the testicles. So that’s why atrophy of the testicles occurs.
* Virtually all police that I see are visibly using PEDs. Most gym goers these days are using something. I would never have believed this until I worked out for a couple of years with an ex football player. He was friends with virtually the entire staff and clientele and they were all open about drug use around him. The biggest surprise to me was women I assumed they weren’t using.
Basically if someone has a “gym” look they are almost certainly using something. Even people that look like they never work out are often on some kind of PED.
* A large part of the bodybuilder cop phenomenon is obvious. Police officers have been stripped of those old use of force standbys, the sap and the nightstick. This was justified by all the damage done to civilian skulls and the attendant law suits. As far back as the sixties federal studies found that cops were far too quick to use nightsticks on people’s noggins. Saps (Blackjacks) had an even worse image and can kill. Mace and Tazzers have proven less than perfect substitutes.
My point is that when police are expected to physically grapple with others, they are going to to “arm up” in order to prevail. This is particularly so when faced with minority offenders who are physically fit and have no basic internalized respect for authority.
A man with a stick will prevail over one or more opponents if sufficiently trained. You don’t have to be really big. You do need to keep up practice, which used to be the pride of the old city cops. Ever wonder why those old Irish cops were constantly flipping and twirling their sticks? Now you know.
Another problem is that our civil rights obsessed legal environment keeps PD’s from having realistic height requirements. We keep hiring small and female cops, then wonder why they try to muscle up.
Finally if we want cops to overpower people with their bare hands, we need to train and constantly retrain them with the best, most effective martial arts regimen. To remain a cop you should gain and retain at least a brown belt in jujitsu if you are forced to grapple with your hands.
* Low to moderate use of steroids probably isn’t a big problem for easy-going “gentle giant” types but it probably is more an issue for violent criminals, impulsive males with ADHD, and cross-wired autogynephiliacs and bisexuals.
* There’s reasonable circumstantial evidence that Jenner juiced like crazy between finishing 10th in the 1972 Olympics at 180 pounds and 1st in 1976 at 220 pounds. But I don’t have a causal link between that and subsequent feelings of gender dysphoria other than that it sounds like it could have done a number on his head.
* I’ve seen all these morbidly obese female cops in Chicago; not just overweight but obese. No way they ever legitimately passed any physical test. Every one on the job blocks a slot from being filled by a real cop. It’s just a form of welfare for preferred groups.
* There’s a gold seam of potential correlations looking at the cultural trends which are downstream of drug use.
When a drug gives the body what it would otherwise produce naturally, then eventually the body will no longer be able to produce the original substance. You can see how pot smokers of the sixties turned depressive in the seventies.
What does this mean for amphetamines, coffee, cocaine, ecstasy, viagra, ritalin etc?
* Every time a cop shoots someone, he should immediately be tested for steroids.
* Yes, it would be a good idea to have an automatic blood test for all types of drugs and alcohol within X hours of any police shooting. (I don’t know what X should be.) With the shooting by a federal agent in my neighborhood in 2010 I had a suspicion that they might have been dragging their feet to sober up — the shooting took place in the parking lot behind a popular bar — although that is pure speculation.
