Performance Enhancing Drugs Should Be Legalized Essay Example for Free

Performance Enhancing Drugs Should Be Legalized Essay The illegal use of anabolic steroids by professional athletes is often a hot button topic in the news. Steroids were banned due to the negative side effects associated with its use. Despite the ban, many athletes are suspected of illicit steroid use to enhance their performance. There is great cost associated with random testing to determine if such athletes use steroids. Anne Whitaker and Rosalyn Carson-Dewitt, in the article, â€Å"Point: Performance Enhancing Drugs Should Be Legalized†, make a somewhat effective argument as to why it should be legalized. This article provides an argument for the legalization of anabolic steroid use by athletes. The authors parallel the use of cosmetic surgery and unhealthy diet regimens by models and actresses and the use of steroids by professional athletes to stay at the top of their games. The authors provide factual information regarding steroids and the effects its use has on the body, followed by their opinion as to how legalization would benefit not only the sports world, but also society as a whole. Whitaker and Carson-Dewitt provide a number of facts regarding the characteristics of steroids, the effects of their use, and the history of its illegalization. They describe different methods for use: cycling (on and off use of a particular dose), stacking (taking multiple steroids simultaneously), and pyramiding (increasing and decreasing the dosage over time) (Whitaker and Carson-Dewitt, 2011). The authors go on to describe the physical effects of steroid use such as organ damage, stroke, cancer and high blood pressure (Whitaker and Carson-Dewitt, 2011). The authors then provide a timeline as to the banning of steroid use in various professional sports organizations followed by a national ban. It is the opinion of Carson-Dewitt and Whitaker that steroids should be legalized. They opined that legalization would have manifold benefits: increased safety and regulation of steroid use, decreased access and use of steroids by teenaged children; and reduction in the costs associated with testing. While, on the surface, these opinions seem to be logical, the arguments are not all supported by facts. The claim that legalization of steroids would reduce its use by teenagers, simply because they would be prescribed by doctors, is baseless. Teenagers would likely continue to access steroids through the same methods currently used. The cost of testing may or may not be reduced as regulation would still limit the amount of steroids to be safely used. Testing would still occur to verify that legal safe limits were observed. The factual information contained in the article is sufficient to provide a perspective from which to understand the authors’ argument. The authors fail, however to provide factual information to support their claims. This results in an argument that sounds plausible on the surface, but falls flat with any amount of critical thinking. For this reason, I believe the authors failed to make a compelling argument. References Carson-Dewitt, Rosalyn, and Whitaker, Ann. â€Å"Point: Performance Enhancing Drugs Should Be Legalized.† By: Points of View: Steroids, 2011.

Importance of the Trial in To Kill a Mockingbird Essay -- Kill Mocking

Importance of the Trial in To Kill a Mockingbird      Ã‚   The trial of Tom Robinson is central to our understanding of racial and social prejudice in Maycomb. Harper Lee uses Tom Robinson's 'crime' to bring tensions in the town to a head and the author uses the trial as a way of making the ideas behind such tensions explicit for the reader.    The two people involved in the so-called crime, Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell, are at the very bottom of Maycomb society. Tom is black and Mayella one of the poorest of the poor whites. However, neither of them fits into the stereotypes held by the people of Maycomb. Tom is honest, hardworking and dependable, as Mr Link Deas's shouted testimony and his demeanour in court demonstrate. Mayella is a member of the poorest and most shiftless families in the town yet she looks after her brothers and sisters, keeps herself clean and tends to her geraniums in the most difficult of circumstances. It is clear that before the alleged rape a sort of friendship had grown up between Tom and Mayella.    Tom Robinson was probably the only person who was decent to (Mayella).    Unfortunately the ideas about race and society held at the time meant that contact between them could never be anything other than distant and respectful (quite apart from the fact that Tom was married anyway). But Mayella's yearning for some form of close human contact emerges during the trial. She had saved for almost a year to have enough nickels to give her brothers and sisters a treat in order to have her house empty when she invited Tom inside. When she made her advance to Tom he was caught by his inability to hit a white woman and the extreme taboo that Maycomb placed on any form of... ...arrated by Scout is that her childish understanding is free of adult prejudice and expectations. She and Jem measure the proceedings against simple child-like ideas of truth and justice and find them grossly wanting. On the other hand Jem is an expert on court behaviour from watching her father on other occasions so she is able to give an insightful account into most aspects of the trial.    The Tom Robinson case shows the ugliness of both racial and social prejudice. Ultimately the jurors choose to vote along racial lines without regard for truth or justice. Mayella and Tom are both victims of Maycomb's prejudice but only Tom has to pay.    Works Cited Jones, Carolyn. "Atticus Finch and the Mad Dog." The Southern Quarterly Summer 1996: 56-63. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York City, NY:   J.B.Lippincott Company, 1990.   

Poverty is a state of mind Essay

Even though some people make millions, poverty is still a problem in today’s society. There is an increasing gap between the wealthiest and the poorest people. This is also a problem in Britain. But is poverty really a state of mind? That is the controversial statement made by freelance writer Bernard Hare who in an essay from 2012 writes about his childhood in poverty in a mining family in Leeds. As an adult, he experiences a different kind of poverty. Bernard Hare was born in 1958 into a poor mining family in Leeds, but he never felt the poverty as a child. His explanation for this is that their house was warm, the neighbors were welcoming, and that he spent a lot of time with his grandmother who lived across the street. Because he did not want to end up in poverty like his parents and also after being encouraged by his grandmother, he got into grammar school and later college. He started to get into fights at stadiums because he supported the football club, Leeds United. He was also arrested on more than one occasion. When Hare got to college, he started to drink and smoke. But he turned it around and became a successful social worker in London until he also had to provide for his father due to mining strikes. After that it all went downhill for Hare. He took drugs, drank, and sold drugs and stolen items. This changed in 1995 when he met the Shed Crew who was a group of 10 to 14 year olds living in an old shed in Hare’s old neighborhood. It put things in perspective and in 1997 he decided to become a writer because he wanted to tell the world the story about the Shed Crew. The final product was a memoir called Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew. Hare uses contrasts in this essay to get his point across. First of all, there is the contrast between his childhood life and his adult life and the differences between the two kinds of poverty he has experienced. Secondly, there is the contrast between the poverty he lived in as a child and the poverty he sees with the Shed Crew. Bernard Hare has lived in poverty for the most of his life, but it has been two kinds of poverty. As a child he lived in absolute poverty where there was not always food at the end of the week. His parents drank and smoked occasionally but according to himself he had a good childhood anyway. He was loved and cared for even though the means were limited. However as a young adult, he went down the wrong path which included drugs, drinking, and criminal behavior. There he experienced a different kind of poverty. In a  way, he chose to be poor. As he also says so himself, he was capable of making good money but he chose the criminal way of life. You can take the boy out of poverty, but you can’t take poverty out of the boy. (P 3 ll. 163-164) As previously said, Hare was loved as a child even though they were poor. That is the biggest difference between Hare†™s childhood and the Shed Crew’s childhood. The Shed Crew had nobody to care for them, and they had been let down by society. Nobody is there to take care of them and to make sure that they will get a decent childhood. He uses his own experiences to shed light on how horrible the Shed Crew’s childhood has been. Hare was poor in terms of money but was rich on love and supporting company – mostly from his grandmother. However, the Shed Crew is poor both in terms of money, but they are also lacking love and support from responsible adults. They are lacking both in the spiritual and the materialistic way whereas Hare’s childhood was safe and good. Throughout the entire essay, Hare uses a lot of pathos in this essay while reflecting on his life story. He shares little, happy anecdotes from his childhood which are written in a humorous way, and he tries to create a mental picture of his childhood. As the years go by, the stories get darker and darker. There is not as much humor in his teenage and adult stories as there is in the childhood stories. This shows that the childish ignorance has disappeared from his mind and that he is now more aware of what is going on around him. Hare also writes that sometimes the decisions you make can effect whether or not you end up in poverty and more importantly how sometimes your choices in life can prevent you from getting out of poverty. For instance, Hare’s grandmother, who was teetotal, said this to him because his parents drank and smoked. â€Å"You’ll never have any money if you drink or smoke† (†¦) I was becoming aware that there might be a self-inflicted element to some people’s poverty. (P 2 ll. 93-94, ll. 98-100) Is poverty really just a state of mind? The state of mind of the person in question might be a contributing factor to whether or not that person is in poverty. However, to say that it is exclusively the state of mind is an exaggeration. There are a lot of contributing elements to why people are poor and the mindset of the person could be an important factor. In some cases it is and in other cases it’s just a matter of not having enough money to live. At least, it was a question of a state of mind for Bernard Hare.

The Stagecoach Non Verbal Communications And Social Classes

The Stagecoach: Non-verbal Communications and Social Classes The Stagecoach, a critically acclaimed film, which followed the adventures of a group of unlikely and unfortunate passengers escaping from the brutality of Geronimo’s Apache warriors, established the precedent of the classic Western movie, containing crucial Western archetypical elements such as Ringo the Kid that has not hardly changed today. Furthermore, Stagecoach espoused social issues of the time by including passengers of varied social status and standing and emphasizing on such interactions that cross the rigidly defined and impermeable social divides at the time. The iconic movie was produced during the transition between silent films and films with spoken dialogue, and the remnants of the former film style are conspicuous throughout the film. Although explicit and spoken plot was crucial for the storyline, non-verbal communication offered implicit cues to attentive audience members. Moreover, the fact that t he passengers were representatives of different social standings further amplified such non-verbal communication and cues. While the film Stagecoach established the quintessential Western movie, the film also underscored the importance of non-verbal communication in the genesis of the spoken dialogue era and emphasized the interactions between rigid social classes in a seemingly disordered environment that is the Western frontier. In Stagecoach, non-verbal communication complements the spoken dialogueShow MoreRelatedBrand Building Blocks96400 Words   |  386 Pagesadvantages - in part because the cost of the brand management team, sales force, and advertising is lower and can be spread over hundreds of product classes and in part because of logistical advantages. The result is more price pressure. Sales promotion is both a driver and an indicator of the price focus. In the 1950s, about 10 percent of the communication mix was devoted to price promotions. Those were the days when distribution was simple, retailers were concerned with building new stores rather