Poll

    As the knowledge of the human body grew, so did the curiosity of how to create synthetic testosterone. Synthetic testosterone is used to help build muscle faster, and help your muscles recover from strenuous activities. Synthetic testosterone, steroids, have been known to create such an advantage that they are outlawed in almost all professional sports. Steroids have tainted the game of baseball with all the widespread and public use of them through out the professional teams. Steriods give obvious advantages, they escalate an athletes training ability, which is a reason they have become more and more widespread, from the professional level all the way down to the high school ranks. An estimated 3 to 6 percent of high school students have used steroids according to the New York Times. That means in our small school of more or less 300 kids, 9-18 students have used steroids. This is alarming due to the side effects of these performance enhancing drugs. On my blog I posed the question, Have you ever or do you know anyone that has ever used steroids? I honestly was not expecting to have a single person say they knew someone who has used steroids, because I have participated in varsity sports all four years of high school. Through out this time period, I had never seen or heard of anyone using steroids. I figured if I hadn’t heard of it, then they must not have either. Well I was wrong.
    3 of the 11 that voted say they knew someone who had used steroids. This is 27 percent of the voters. Way more than the actually average that the New York Times reports. This means 72 percent of voters did not know anyone that had taken steroids. It would be interesting to give this poll to the whole school and see how many yeses we get. I would think we would get somewhere near 20, basing it off the 11 prior voters. I believe the numbers came out this way because more and more people are trying to get  any advantage they can. If someone can take a pill and it will increase their athletic abilities then they will do it if it is that easy. Pressure also adds to why the numbers came out this way. Many young people have the aspirations to make it big in what ever sport they are in, and they will take the pills to give them that advantage.
    If I could take some more steps in the mystery of steroids amongst high school students, I would, like I said, give the entire school the survey to see the results. Then try and find the newest research and statistics on the spread of steroids throughout high school students. Overall, it was kind of alarming that 3 out of 11 people knew or had done steroids. This leads me to believe that there are more kids using steroids than the New York Times has reported.