PED
(Performance enhancing drugs)
The goal of this site is to serve as a general treatise on the vast topic of use of performance enhancing drugs in athletic competition. It begins by laying out the extensive history of doping in sports, from the ancient Romans to the East German Olympic swim team to the steroids scandal in baseball.
The site moves on to describe and discuss the many medical effects that use of performance enhancing drugs might trigger. The page concludes by discussing the appropriateness of anti-doping policy in general by analyzing and scrutinizing the general strands of arguments that are used to support bans on doping. While many rationales are rejected, a few are ultimately accepted and they justify the implementation of anti-doping policies
INTRODUCTION
ABOUT THEM
Performance enhancing drugs are used in sports
to make an athlete faster, bigger, and stronger by taking hormones, stimulants, and supplements. In sports the term is known as "doping" and in mostly all cases is banned in sports because it enhances the athlete's performance unnaturally. Performance enhancing drugs are usually taken in a supplement or injection form. Many famous athletes have taken performance enhancing drugs such as Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Barry Bonds and many other athletes.
HISTORY
The use of performance enhancing drugs is about as old as sports themselves. According to the text "Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior", the Egyptians, Greek Olympians, and Aztecs used performance enhancing drugs to help with athletic competitions, as well as in battles and hunting. The use of stimulants became more well known in the 1800's and early 1900's.
During these times, testing for illicit substances was unheard of in these early times. Even animals were given some of these enhancers to improve their performance in events. The term “doping” has its roots in the Dutch word dop , which was the name of an alcoholic beverage made of grape skins. It was supposed to act as a stimulant and to enhance the prowess of the South African Zulu warriors who drank the elixir. While the term “doping” was not introduced as part of popular vernacular until the late 19th century, the concept of using artificial means to gain an advantage in battle or competition has existed since ancient times. Athletes would drink special potions and eat specific meals with the belief, correct or not, that it would boost their performance.
HEALTH EFFECTS
Just as there are a myriad of different performance enhancing drugs, there are also a myriad of diverse health effects that can stem from the use of those drugs. Since a comprehensive examination of all the effects of all known performance-enhancing drugs would result in an encyclopedic volume, this paper will focus on the health effects of three different types of performance-enhancing drugs/methods: anabolic steroids, blood doping, and human growth hormone. These were selected due to their distinct differences in their effects as ergogenic aids and their potential adverse side-effects.
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In the human body, steroids are hormones responsible for regulating certain substances from the adrenal cortex. Thus, steroids are very powerful chemicals that can provide many benefits, as well as detriments, to human health. One well-known beneficial use of steroids is in asthma inhalers, which act by preventing inflammation of certain airways. Flovent and Advair, two popular medications often advertised on television and in print, are examples of asthma inhalers that contain steroids.
On the other hand, anabolic steroids, or anabolic-androgenic steroids to be more exact, are essentially synthetic testosterone hormones that produce the benefits, as well as side-effects, that the athletes are looking for. The term ‘anabolic’ refers to the hormone’s ability to build up organs and tissues, which in this case tends to be the muscles that the athletes are trying to develop. The term ‘androgenic,’ which is often left out for convenience and perhaps also to downplay the side-effects, refers to the drug’s effect on the male sex organs, as well as development of the male secondary sex characteristics.
Policy
Now that the history, background, and medical effects of various performance enhancing drugs has been established, the question becomes whether or not they should be banned from sports. Most of the time, the consensus is a resounding yes, but without a substantiated rationale or justification. Many of the rationales provided often include phrases such as, “integrity of the game,” or “sportsmanship” or “unfair advantage,” but are those ideas valid bases for banning performance enhancing drugs? When athletes try to achieve athletic excellence through the use of chemicals and drugs, widespread condemnation never fails to ensue. Is that condemnation justified, or have we, as a nation and society, simply presumed the conclusion that excellence assisted by chemicals and drugs, should be discouraged and prohibited? Some of that condemnation might stem from the fact that the athlete is cheating and disregarding the rules of the sport.
However, the sentiment against “cheating” must be set aside in this analysis because it merely presupposes the rule against doping, the rule which this paper is analyzing. If there is no rule against doping, then an athlete’s use of performance enhancing drugs would no longer be cheating.
Harm is practically the universal reason for banning steroids and other performance enhancing drugs from sports, whether it’s harm to the sport’s integrity, physical harm to the athletes, harm to the children, etc. Thus, a general idea of “harm” is much too broad and vague to lend itself to careful analysis. Rather, each type of harm must be carefully examined to see whether it serves as a valid basis for banning performance enhancing drugs.
CONCLUSION
Throughout the long history of sport, participants have always sought an advantage over their opponents, be it through training, technique, equipment, or medicine. Steroids, human growth hormone, and other performance enhancing drugs are merely the most recent development. And while there is strong anecdotal evidence about the detrimental effects of many performance enhancing drugs, there is still much to be learned and studied about many other drugs. The medical consensus for many of these other drugs has yet to be reached, and perhaps, society and public opinion should allow the drugs to be fully investigated and researched before reaching a conclusion about the dangers and immorality associated with the use of such drugs. That being said, there have been many rationales set forth by commentators, analysts, and the public at large, as to why performance enhancing drugs should be banned from sports. Many of these arguments, as this paper has sought to demonstrate, are spurious and should not be grounds for banning steroids from the game. However, there are a couple arguments that stand up to rigorous analysis. One is the physical harm that many of these drugs are strongly suspected of causing. This rationale is particularly strong when viewed from the context of the prisoner’s dilemma. The other argument is not so much a rationale, as merely an explanation: performance enhancing drugs should be banned because society says they should be banned. The democratic nature of sports requires that sports ban performance enhancing drugs. But it should be noted that these bans are not without costs and harms to innocent athletes, and these costs should be kept in mind when evaluating whether to maintain, expand, or eliminate doping policies. When all’s said and done, however, sports leagues are doing the right thing by prohibiting the use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs by their athletes, at least until additional medical consensus is reached
