Time & Perspective Quote by Jose Canseco

Canseco isn’t defending steroids so much as attacking the lazy storyline that always follows them: take a complicated human act, pin it to a single chemical, call it closure. The questions come in a rapid one-two, less like careful reasoning than like a locker-room cross-examination. He’s trying to flip the burden of proof back onto the public, the league, and the media: if you’re going to treat “roid rage” as an automatic explanation, explain ordinary rage too. The move is classic whataboutism, but it’s also a fair jab at how badly we want a simple villain.

The subtext is reputational triage. Canseco, a central figure in baseball’s steroid era, knows the cultural script: steroids equal cheating, corruption, and moral rot. By widening the frame to all violence, he nudges the listener from “steroids made him do it” to “people are responsible for what they do,” a subtle attempt to separate enhancement from culpability. It’s an argument for agency that conveniently protects the product.

Context matters: late-20th-century sports turned pharmacology into a morality play. Fans felt betrayed, journalists hunted for causes, and “roid rage” became a headline-ready diagnosis. Canseco’s line works because it targets that desire for narrative neatness. It also reveals the era’s uncomfortable truth: we demand superhuman performance, then act shocked when the mechanisms behind it look ugly. His questions don’t absolve steroids; they expose how quickly we turn them into a catch-all excuse when what we really want is a scapegoat.