Boy, I go away for a week and Raffy is caught on the juice. Too bad. I've always liked him, and while his juice use doesn't bother me too much, his bald-faced lying is tough to stomach. Unlike President Bush, I don't believe him (unless some information comes out to exonerate him, which it hasn't yet, which is odd).

I disagree with most of what Art Caplan has to say here

It is easy to condemn steroid use. The drugs, while effective, are dangerous. But what if they were not? How are professional and amateur sports going to deal with the impending explosion in performance-enhancing drugs and bioengineering tricks that can boost performance with little or no risk for the user?

For example, at my school, the University of Pennsylvania, physiologist Lee Sweeney is hard at work trying to find ways to tweak genes to make muscles grow bigger and more dense. This research holds out real hope for those with muscular dystrophy and other debilitating muscle diseases.

But the gene transfer technology he is working on will also allow normal muscles to be made bigger and stronger. Figuring out who may or may not have engaged in "gene-doping" will prove next to impossible. And it is likely that there will be little risk associated with genetically altering muscle cells.

Similarly, scientists around the world are busy making pills that enhance our performance a bit by letting us sleep better, fight fatigue, slow the loss of memory, speed up learning, recover more quickly from hard exertion and calm anxieties. Some of us already are benefiting from drugs like these when we use Ambien, Provigil, Ritalin, Prozac or Effexor.

So what are we going to say when the archer, the chess master, the competitive marksman, the Nascar driver or the women's professional golfer says, "If I take these same drugs I just might get enough of an edge to move ahead of my competition"?

One problem with this is Caplan skips over any serious consideration of the relative dangers of steroids, which are not what are commonly believed. This is one reason so many athletes have been taking them. Until we have a more honest assessment of the relative risks involved, our public debate over this will be totally incoherent.