Drugs in Sport

Freedom of choice. If athletes wish to take drugs in search of improved performances, let them do so. They harm nobody but themselves and should be treated as adults, capable of making rational decisions upon the basis of widely-available information. Even if there are adverse health effects in the long-term, this is also true of both tobacco and boxing, which remain legal.

Natural/unnatural distinction untenable. Already athletes use all sorts of dietary supplements, exercises, equipment, clothing, training regimes, medical treatments, etc. to enhance their performance. There is nothing ‘natural’ about taking vitamin pills, wearing whole-body Lycra suits, having surgery on ligaments, spending every day in a gym pumping weights, running in shoes with spikes on the bottom, etc. Diet, medicine, technology, and even just coaching already give an artificial advantage to those athletes who can afford the best of all these aids. Since there is no clear way to distinguish from legitimate and illegitimate artificial aids to performance, they should all be allowed.

Levels the playing field. Currently suspicion over drug use surrounds every sport and every successful athlete, and those competitors who don’t take performance-enhancing drugs see themselves as disadvantaged. Some drugs can’t be tested for, and in any case, new medical and chemical advances mean that the cheats will always be ahead of the testers. Legalisation would remove this uncertainty and allow everyone to compete openly and fairly.

Better spectacle for spectators. Sport has become a branch of the entertainment business and the public demands “higher, faster, stronger” from athletes. If drug-use allows world records to be continually broken, and makes American Football players bigger and more exciting to watch, why deny the public what they want, especially if the athletes want to give it to them?

Current rules are very arbitrary and unfair:e.g. cold remedies denied to athletes, even in sports where any stimulating effect these might have is minimal (e.g. Gymnastics in the Sydney Olympics)e.g. the possibility that some positive tests are simply the result of using a combination of legal food supplements (e.g. nandrolone) e.g. creatine is legal despite health riskse.g. cyclists legally having heart operations to allow increased circulation and thus improve performance.

Bans increasingly fail to stand up in court. The whole legal basis for drugs-testing and the subsequent banning of transgressors is open to challenge, both as restraint of trade and invasion of privacy, and on scientific and methodological grounds. Sports’ governing bodies fighting, and often losing, such court cases wastes vast sums of money.

If legal then drugs can be controlled and monitored by doctors, making them much safer. Athletes on drugs today often take far more than is needed for performance-enhancement, running needless health risks as a result, simply because of ignorance and the need for secrecy. Legalisation allows more information to become available and open medical supervision will avoid many of the health problems currently associated with performance-enhancing drugs.