Letters to the Editor
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If Bonds goes to prison..
... it won't tell us much about Bonds but it will send out a powerful message to many baseball fans, especially the impressionable young, that doing steroids without a valid medical purpose is stupid and dangerous, not to mention ILLEGAL
A few weeks ago in a previous letter on the subject, I mentioned a muscular young man aged 21 at my work who had built up his body using steroids because his girlfriend had told him he was not "big" enough. I mentioned that he was prone to sudden rages and loss of temper and that recently he had got into a fight in a bar, badly hurt someone, and had been arrested, leading to his suspension from work.
Two weeks ago I saw a familiar looking name in a small article in the local Sunday paper. The same guy had been in a single vehicle accident at 3:35 on Thursday morning and had died on the spot.
Now, I cannot absolutely prove that steroids caused his death. No doubt alcohol, a legal product, was partly to blame and it would not have been a bad idea to use a seatbelt. But I strongly believe that if he had not been using illegal steroids, he would mostl likely still be alive, because the chain of events that led to his decline might have been interrupted.
OK, he was probably a pretty worthless individual. He certainly did not have Bond's societal value as a person blessed with innate psychomotor skills that enabled him to hit a ball a long way with a stick.
But someone said to me: "Hey, Brian was a buddy of your, wasn't he?" Well, he wasn't a buddy, but he was a young person in need of guidance who sometimes asked my opinion about relationship matters.
He might or might not have been influenced by seeing someone like Bonds go to jail for using steroids illegally and then lying about it under oath. But in as much as young people are influenced by anybody or anything, they might be influenced against using steroids when they see a big shot like Bonds in the slammer.
Certainly top athletes often talk about being "role models", so Bonds could provide some community service by modeling the role of prisoner for liars and cheats.
So no, this indictment will not tell us anything about Bonds, but that is not the point.
I know that you, King, are a libertarian who believes that all drugs should be legally available over-the-counter without prescription and that the weak should go to the wall, hell, or whatever their ultimate destination, but I just disagree profoudly with your basic position, because if it was implemented (which it never will be), it would be quite disastrous.