ABSTRACT
No one familiar with the history of drug use in sports will be surprised by an athlete’s innovative use of a medication, especially one that is prescribed to create courage and self-confidence in timid, lethargic, or demoralized people. While Dr. Peter D. Kramer's phenomenal best seller Listening to Prozac makes many claims for the drug, the treatment of endocrinological disorders is not one of them. In Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer makes a point of undermining what he calls pharmacological Calvinism, defined as a general distrust of drugs used for nontherapeutic purposes. Ironically, the criminalization of steroids has been an obstacle to their use for legitimate purposes. At the Ninth International Conference on AIDS, held in Berlin in 1993, physicians urged that anabolic steroids become a standard treatment for AIDS patients and people who are HIV-positive.
