The players who took steroids or HGH before baseball negotiated penalties did nothing wrong. Those who did since that agreement broke a rule and should be penalized as determined in the rule.

There is no reason for any of us to care or to want to know beyond prurient interest into manufactured sin.

Incidentally, this is from Posnanski's blog, a comment on Buck O'Neill's view on the issue. I think he is exactly right.
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"It's funny, there have been several million words written in the past couple of weeks about steroids in baseball (and also HGH which is very different -- but let's use "steroids" here to describe the entire set of drugs). People are so hot-headed about the topic, you can't really talk to anybody. More and more, though, I think back to what Buck O'Neil used to say. He would shock people all the time. They expected him to be outraged about steroids and cheating, and he really was not. He used to say, "The only reason we didn't use steroids in my time is that we didn't have them." He said baseball players -- premier athletes in general -- look for that edge. It just in the nature of competitive athletes.

Then he said something else: He wondered why people didn't talk more about the health risks. If steroids really are dangerous enough to be illegal without prescriptions -- more dangerous than, say, cigarettes or alcohol or other over the counter legal drugs -- then he wished people would talk about THAT rather than talking about how many more home runs you could hit using steroids. He despised the phrase "performance enhancing drugs." He would have preferred something like "life-threatening drugs."

Of course, it seems that the long-term health risks for steroids, HGH and other PED's are not especially clear cut -- people argue about the dangers all the time. So maybe that's why I cannot remember the last steroids story I read that actually detailed the health risks. In any case, with all the hysteria surrounding steroids and baseball now, I really wish some more people could just express some of the common sense that Buck always expressed. Let's try to remember what this is all about anyway.

Then again, it's been more than a year since he's been gone, and I can't tell you how many times I've thought that over that year -- how many times I've missed Buck's common sense."
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Anyone who will not vote for Bonds or Clemens for the Hall of Fame hasn't an ounce of sense in his head.

Ted Kluszewski: From ages 24-28 he hit 11, 8, 25, 13 & 16 home runs. Then over the next 4 he hit 40, 49, 47 & 35 before returning to 6, 4, 2, 2, 5.

Musial: From ages 21-25, he hit 10, 13, 12, 16 & 19 home runs. Then at age 26 he hit 39 and continued a power hitter for a long time.

Yastrzemski: From ages 21-26, he hit 11, 19, 14, 15, 20 & 16 home runs. Suddenly in the next 4 years he hit 44, 23, 40 & 40 and just as suddenly hit only in the teens with one 21 home run year exception until at age 37 he hit 28 before returning to form.

Those are just 3 prominent examples. There are many, many more. The entire effort to evaluate players as enhanced (as if that is bad, itself a stupid assumption) or not, the bandying of names and rumors, the comparison of one player to another to figure out who should be the subject of a whispering campaign, is disgusting and immoral.      

http://mlbfleecefactor.com/2007/12/23/the-all-overpaid-team/

Except that, you know, possession of steroids in the USA without a prescription is ILLEGAL.

Other than that, no reason at all.

Fine, I agree. People who violate the law should be penalized according to the provisions. That is a job of government, by the way, not employers. And while I do not consider using steroids a form of civil disobedience, I certainly do consider the legislation regarding drugs to be both irrational and disastrously ineffective, and the boundaries between legal and illegal to be fuzzy enough as to be virtually meaningless. As a matter of fact, lumping all the "users" together is an example of the stupidity of the whole affair as  it condemns as one those who used them for repair, for hoped-for enhancement, by prescription, by trainers, by themselves and every other circumstance. It even condemns those who used legal substances.

I am appalled at lawbreaking and consider it necessary to find and punish criminals. But it is almost impossible not to break laws regularly. I try to be a careful driver, but especially on long trips I sometimes speed. What I am doing is far more socially harmful than taking steroids. Should we condemn all the athletes who drive too fast, or only those who take speed? Do we need investigations into player's driving habits? I know, that has nothing to do with performance in games (although for those old fart hypocrites, amphetamines do), but even if steroids are supposed to or might have, we cannot isolate those effects, and now there is a policy while before there was not. We need to enforce the current policy, not investigate past actions that did not transgress any baseball rules.

The laws against steroid use have far less social significance or moral standing than those against speeding or even tax cheating. I do expect people guilty of those latter violations to be caught by authorities and punished, but I do not expect baseball authorities to investigate, publish and create a whirlwind of publicity around such violators. To do so would indeed be manufacturing sin.

I never used any pills to help me stay awake to study. As a matter of fact, I despise all drugs, even legal ones. But many of my classmates did, and to the extent it helped them artificially, it enhanced not just their grades in particular courses but their overall GPA to my detriment in terms of ranking. In fact, some of those courses were graded on strict curves which further injured my standing.

Many of those classmates are now professionals in various fields. Should their employers and clients be apprised of their cheating and use of illegal substances? Should I demand a review of their college records to reassess my standing? Should their records be expunged or black-marked in some way to distinguish them from my clean one? The entire proposition is ridiculous, of course, but no more so than this frenzied reconsideration of the baseball records of recent years.