Performance enhancers are over-rated.

I am starting to get really sick and tired of hearing about performance enhancing drugs and their effects on sports.
Granted if a person takes performance enhancing drugs it is going aid their performance, but to what extent?
Barry Bonds, the poster man for performance enhancing drugs was ALREADY a Hall of Famer before he allegedly began using steroids. If you look at Bonds’ statistics he was on pace to have over 500 hundred home runs possibly 600 WITHOUT any help from performance enhancers.
The newest guilty party appears to be that of Cleveland Indians pitcher Paul Byrd. Byrd allegedly took Human Growth Hormone from 2002-2005. Byrd claims he was recovering from a tumor on his pituitary gland, and that he took the Hormone under medical supervision and that he made it aware to both the Indians and Major League Baseball. Both the Indians and MLB denied that Byrd ever told them he was taking HGH, but regardless it shouldn’t even matter and here’s why.
First of all, every baseball player who used performance enhancing drugs prior to the 2005 season should not be punished. Prior to 2005 baseball did not have a drug testing policy and therefore it was not illegal to take steroids, HGH, or anything else so long as it was prescribed by a “doctor”.
Granted many of these doctors have since had their licenses revoked or have been federally indicted but that is their problem, NOT the players they prescribed to. Baseball made their bed and they need to sleep in it too.
Not to mention the fact that for as long as there have been professional sports there have been performance enhancers in sports. For years professional baseball players took amphetamines a stimulant to help them maintain their energy between games.
People talk about “tainting” baseballs records. The players who set these records were using performance enhancers to get an edge as well. Granted amphetamines are not on the same level as steroids or HGH, but with the list of the accused getting longer by the day it is possible that some of these players were just taking the drugs to keep up with where they should be, not to gain an edge. It is equally as tough to compare someone from the 1960’s who may have used amphetamines against someone from the dead ball era as it is to compare steroid era players to the amphetamine users.
Finally who decides which drugs are considered performance enhancers and which ones aren’t? The NFL has a laundry list of banned supplements, that supposedly when taken make a player perform at a higher level. I was watching a game last weekend when I saw a quarterback leave the game with a shoulder injury only to come back after taking cortisone shots. The announcer said this as if it was no big deal, but to me it only highlights the hypocrisy of professional sports. How is taking a shot to make you play through an injury any different than taking HGH? A performance enhancing drug does just that: enhances your performance beyond what you could do without it. If these players play better with the shot then they would without it, I would call that a performance enhancing drug, but hey that’s just me.
Professional sports need to spend less time discussing steroids and more time trying to resist the corporate world, which is trying to ruin sports as we know it. Forget performance enhancing drugs and focus on more important problems.