WC Debate - RR: Performance enhancing drugs should be legal for use in all major sports leagues

Thanks to Actionsspeak for clarifying his case and for his opening remarks. This looks to be an interesting debate. I ask the audience to recognize that even his case is a departure from status quo. He would like to afford the capacity to decide whether steroid and hormone usage is allowed in any given sport to the sporting leagues themselves, and thus take it out of the hands of legislators. Con's third contention made it clear that the league, not lawmakers, should have the right to determine how a sport is played. So what we're really discussing here is whether or not the option should be available to individuals or to sporting leagues, not whether their usage should be legalized or not. This is an important distinction, and one that should be kept in mind that the American legal structures [1] aren't going to be an impediment in either of our cases as this debate goes forward. Now, onto my rebuttals. On Equality: 1. Sports aren't about equality. If it was, we wouldn't have winners and losers. The system of competition is meant to elevate those who are better at what they do, whether that's as a result of inherent capacities or how well they use their resources. No one is entitled to play professional sports " it's a privilege requiring enormous sacrifice and massive risk, whether they use steroids or not, and most walk away. If Con wants equality, sports isn't the place to find it. 2. Sports aren't equal. Recall two things I said in R2. First, I discussed what athletes do in order to get in shape. Flying into the mountains to thicken the blood and increase the flow of oxygen through their bodies isn't something everyone can do before competitions, nor can they all find training facilities above a certain altitude. Even among those that can, not all of them will have access to top of the line equipment, masseuses, trainers, or all the other expenses required to build muscle quickly and efficiently. They don't all have access to the same megadoses of vitamin pills, dietary supplements, equipment, clothing, or medical treatments that are allowed to everyone in status quo. Hell, things like hyperbaric oxygen chambers, which increase the rate of recovery for players, are being purchased by many teams and players at tremendous costs, providing them and only them an appreciable advantage.[2] and would continue to be allowed in Con's case. Why are steroids so special? Second, I talked about how some people just have higher inherent capacities. They produce more testosterone, HGH or erythropoeitin, they can endure a faster heartbeat, or even the fact that they produce normal blood cells. Not everyone has those advantages, and Con has provided no way for anyone to make up for any such deficiencies. Only my plan seeks to solve for these concerns. 3. Con's case is worse for equality. Black market drugs are more expensive, harder to find,[3] and more dangerous, but more on that last point later. But you can look at this point one of two ways. You can accept that steroid usage causes more steroid usage, in which case Con's case is more detrimental there's already a system in place where athletes feel the need to use steroids and hormones to succeed. The only difference is that they can't use the cheapest, safest, and most well-known steroids prescribed directly by doctors at specific doses and lower cost. Con provides absolutely no reason to believe that legalization will increase usage over status quo. Even if he does, recognize that equality is only a larger problem within his case and in the status quo. The only reason why an advantage such as steroids would be considered unfair is if they're unequally distributed, but as I pointed out in the previous round, the distribution is currently as unequal as it gets. Using basic steroids and hormones instead of what's available on the black market will lower, not raise, the barrier for entry, and increase fairness to all athletes. Or you can notice that this argument has no warrant. Con asserts that steroid usage among some athletes will spread to other athletes who want to compete. This is nothing more than an assertion, and one which is not well explained. Mandatory testing programs among MLB players have revealed that a whopping 5-7% of athletes were using steroids[4], which means 93-95% of athletes were able to play at a very high level without coercion. There's no reason to believe that legalization will cause these numbers to balloon out of control. The uncertainty regarding who is using steroids/hormones in status quo, if anything, creates more impetus to use than a transparent system where everyone who does use does so openly. 4. Con also allows sports leagues to create their own barriers to entry for those with anemia, low testosterone production, reduced muscle growth, and anything else that puts them at a marked disadvantage. He allows individual leagues to discriminate against these groups, harming any sense of equality by denying access to those who could easily keep up if they had access to the available resources. On Health Concerns: 1. Athletes are already forced into an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle and die young. I made this clear in the previous round, but there's no significant difference between any of the health harms presented by Con and the ones I presented in R2. Con will have to address my point that these harms are non-unique and my hypocrisy arguments as well in the next round in order to win this point. 2. Health concerns are worse in an environment where black market drugs are the only ones being used. The reality is that the health concerns are far more excessive using designer steroids and gene doping, as I pointed out last round. Worse yet, his case only exacerbates these harms by legalizing their usage in the general community, but not in all sports. In my case, incentive to use designer steroids and gene doping is erased due to their expense and ineffectiveness by comparison. Con encourages the legal usage of the most dangerous doping substances. 3. Each athlete accepts these health concerns the moment they take these drugs. There's no reason why athletes shouldn't be able to take these concerns on themselves, especially if they know about them in advance. Since Con's case encourages athletes to pursue drugs with unknown health harms, his forces a lower capacity to consent than mine does. On "The league's rights": 1. There's no impact here. Con doesn't explain how changes in the way sports are played is actually harmful. Even if this is certain to happen, the lack of a harm makes it unimportant. 2. There's no warrant for this claim. Con doesn't explain how a change in one rule affects another one. The only possible warrant is a slippery slope fallacy, which has no rational basis in this debate. Worse yet, even if it was true that one rule change could link to another, the rules he's trying to link have nothing in common. The rules of what an athlete can do to their own bodies have no effect on whether any player can disregard the basic rules of how a sport is played in competition. 3. The league doesn't have a right to deny access based on any person's characteristics, training regimen, or nutritional intake. This is one of the very few influences they have on what athletes can take and use for playing their sports, and it's done with extreme hypocrisy based on shaky reasoning. Leagues should not be allowed to spurn athletes who they think have an unfair advantage based on other characteristics, and yet Con wants us to believe that this is crossing some special line. With that, I leave it to my opponent to rebut my case and respond to these arguments. 1. http://www.steroidabuse.com... 2. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com... 3. http://www.theguardian.com... 4. http://mlb.mlb.com...