It means that steroids keep you young. You may not like to hear it stated that way, because steroids are evil, wicked, mean and nasty and youth is a good thing, but...that’s what it means. Steroids help the athlete resist the effects of aging. Well, if steroids help keep you young, what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that is that steroids may help keep players "young" at some risk to their health, and the use of steroids by athletes may lead non-athletes to risk their health as well.
But the fact is that, with time, the use of drugs like steroids will not disappear from our culture. It will, in fact, grow, eventually becoming so common that it might almost be said to be ubiquitous. Everybody wants to stay young. As we move forward in time, more and more people are going to use more and more drugs in an effort to stay young. Many of these drugs are going to be steroids or the descendants of steroids. If we look into the future, then, we can reliably foresee a time in which everybody is going to be using steroids or their pharmaceutical descendants. We will learn to control the health risks of these drugs, or we will develop alternatives to them. Once that happens, people will start living to age 200 or 300 or 1,000, and doctors will begin routinely prescribing drugs to help you live to be 200 or 300 or 1,000. If you look into the future 40 or 50 years, I think it is quite likely that every citizen will routinely take anti-aging pills every day.
How, then, are those people of the future—who are taking steroids every day—going to look back on baseball players who used steroids? They’re going to look back on them as pioneers. They’re going to look back at it and say "So what?"
The argument for discriminating against PED users rests upon the assumption of the moral superiority of non-drug users. But in a culture in which everyone routinely uses steroids, that argument cannot possibly prevail. You can like it or you can dislike it, but your grandchildren are going to be steroid users. Therefore, they are very likely to be people who do not regard the use of steroids as a moral failing. They are more likely to regard the banning of steroids as a bizarre artifice of the past.
~Bill James, Cooperstown and the 'Roids
The legendary Bill James finally speaks out on steroids in baseball. If you have any interest at all in baseball, I recommend you read the entire thing.
There are two things which strike me as being particularly interesting about the quoted section. The first is the premise that life-extending and youth extending drugs will, inevitably, become commonplace. Does the prospect of having the vigor of your twenties in your seventies appeal to you, or disturb you?
The second is the observation that we, as a society, feel justified in punishing illegal drug users out of a sense of moral superiority, rather than out of fealty to the law or the rules. I suspect that is very true, but when everyone is busy talking about how 90% of our money has cocaine on it, I wonder what is the source of that sense of moral superiority? Is it more than simply the superiority of not getting caught?