  The reading to blame for the “drama” taking place in my
Veritas Symposium is called “Drugstore Athlete,” written by
Malcolm Gladwell. In his writing, Gladwell raises plenty of
thought-provoking questions: Is an athlete’s use of steroids the
equivalent of, say, a depressed person’s use of Ritalin? Should
the same rules that apply to the athletic realm also be applied
to the social realm? Does dependence on an artificial aid always
count as “cheating,” even in medicine? The excerpt was a short,
five-minute read, but it was chock full of subtexts and
implications that would take hours to read if also written out.
So you can already imagine the kinds of discussions and opinions
that were raised in the class discussion. Some took the side of
Gladwell, others took the opposite stance, and a few were
somewhere in the middle. What really made the debates
interesting, though, was how most of us were willing to use our
personal experiences as weapons to support our points. Even I
was able to gather the courage to sh