Good article by SI's Tom Verducci about amphetamines in baseball. My personal take on both steroids and amphetamines is that the issue should be the health of players. If a large percentage of players are using a drug to enhance their performance, it puts pressure on everybody else to do it. And it's unfair to the rest of the players to give them the choice of (1) not perform as well as all the enhanced players or (2) suffer short-term or long-term medical problems. I haven't really been convinced that either steroids or amphetamines are all that dangerous if done in a controlled manner, but I think that should be the issue: how damaging are these drugs.

Anyway, here are some excerpts from the article:

Caminiti: "I would say there are only a couple of guys on a team that don't take greenies before a game. One or two guys. That's called going out there naked. And you hear it all the time from teammates, 'You're not going to play naked, are you?'

Former outfielder Chad Curtis agreed with Caminiti: "You might have one team where eight guys play naked and another team where nobody does, but that sounds about right. Steroids are popular, but quite a lot more guys take [amphetamines] than steroids. I'm talking about illegal stuff. Speed ... ritalin, which is legal only with a doctor's prescription ... sometimes guys don't even know what they're taking. One guy will take some pills out of his locker and tell somebody else, 'Here, take one of these. You'll feel better.' And the other guy will take it and not even know what it is."

"Curtis added that amphetamine use is so prevalent that non-users are sometimes ostracized as slackers."