Performance Enhancers

So Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record last night, beating me to my milestone.

I'm not really sure what the ambiguity here is. I have friends who will say a variation of "Well, there's no proof that he used steroids, and even if he did, they weren't specifically banned by baseball".

Come on. It's pretty clear that:

-- He used steroids, whether he knew he was or not. Personally, I believe that he knew fully well what he was putting into his body; he seems like exactly the kind of guy who would always be sure what he was putting into his body.

-- It doesn't matter if baseball banned them. They were illegal.

It does raise some interesting ethical questions though. What if they were legal? Would the record be as tainted?

Or, spinning it toward screenwriting, what if there was a pill that could make you a better writer? That could open up the pathways of your mind, and enable you to write richer dialogue, as well as write longer every day without getting tired or burned out?

You'd still have to be a good writer. The pill doesn't give you that. Just like the steroids didn't make Bonds the great hitter that he is -- they just made his hits fly harder and further.

Would you take the writer pill, if it was legal?

What if it had side effects? What if it made your testicles smaller or your vagina bigger, or threatened to take years off your life?

What if so many other writers were taking it, that the only way to succeed in the business was to take it yourself?

Would a screenwriter's Oscar be tainted if it was revealed that he'd been taking a pill like this?

What if it wasn't legal? What if you had to score some on a street corner, or go to Mexico?

And who's to say that a pill like this doesn't already exist, that we are just out of the loop?

Would you take the pill?