Should performance enhancing drugs (such as steroids) be accepted in sports?
General Reference (not clearly pro or con)
Jasmin Guénette, MA, Academic Programs Director of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, wrote the following in his June 18, 2006 article titled "In Defence of Steroids," published in the webszine Le Québécois Libre:
"Now, should baseball-or any other professional league-ban performance-enhancing drugs? The answer is yes, if they want to...
Private companies and associations should be able to define what rules will govern them without any intervention from politicians. A private association has no obligation to accept me if I don't agree to their rules, just as I should not be forced to join any associations I don't think are fit for me. This logic should also prevail when it comes to the sale and use of steroids. If a group of people, let's say Bodybuilders and Co., think performance-enhancing drugs are OK, they should be left alone if they don't force anybody to follow their path. Sadly, this is not how things are done. Today, the debate about steroid use is widely dominated by morally superior do-gooders who believe it's not right for an athlete to use products that help him or her perform better...
I am not suggesting that people should take steroids or use other drugs. But just as I don't want other people choosing what's right for me, I don't want to choose what's right for others. This is what respect is all about; not forcing other people to think like you, to act like you and to obey laws simply because vote-seeking politicians and their allies think some products should be illegal."
Verner Møller, PhD, Professor and Research Director at the Center for Sport at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, wrote the following in his 2008 book The Doping Devil:
"It has been asserted that sport would lose its power to fascinate and its popularity if medically hazardous doping practices were not eliminated. But panicked pronouncements of this kind stand in direct contradiction to the attitude taken toward other forms of culture with which sport can be compared.
Consider, for example, how we look on with equanimity as ballet dancers submit their bodies to training regimens that turn some of them into invalids...
Or think about how we continue to appreciate the music of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, despite the fact that all of them died as a consequence of alcohol and drug abuse before they turned thirty. Who really believes that someone who has learned to appreciate their music might suddenly wake up one day and say it wasn't worth listening to, because he had just found out that this music was inspired by illicit drugs?"
Should performance enhancing drugs (such as steroids) be accepted in sports?
PRO (yes)
CON (no)
Bennett Foddy, DPhil, Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and Julian Savulescu, PhD, Professor and Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, wrote the following in their June 2007 chapter titled "Ethics of Performance Enhancement in Sport: Drugs and Gene Doping," published in Principle of Health Care Ethics:
"It would be much easier to eliminate the anti-doping rules than to eliminate doping. The current policy against doping has proved expensive and difficult to police. In the near future it may become impossible to police...
Because doping is illegal, the pressure is to make performance enhancers undetectable, rather than safe. Performance enhancers are produced or bought on the black market and administered in a clandestine, uncontrolled way with no monitoring of the athlete's health. Allowing the use of performance enhancers would make sport safer as there would be less pressure on athletes to take unsafe enhancers and a pressure to develop new safe performance enhancers and to make existing enhancers more effective at safe dosages...
The removal of doping controls would have major benefits: less cheating, increased solidarity and respect between athletes, more focus on sport and not on rules."
Adrianne Blue, Senior Lecturer in International Journalism in the Department of Journalism and Publishing at City University London, stated the following in her Aug. 14, 2006 article "It's the Real Dope," published in the New Statesman:
"Today, sport's dirty little secret is drugs, and it is high time we made them legal. Performance-enhancing drugs may not be desirable, but they are here to stay. What we can do away with is the hypocrisy.
Insiders know that many - perhaps most - top players in all sports take drugs to train harder and feel no pain during play. The trainers, sports doctors, nutritionists, physiotherapists and managers of the big names make sure banned substances are taken at the safest and most efficient levels, and when they can, the governing bodies look the other way...
The main effect of banning such substances has been to turn performers and their coaches into liars and cheats. We should legalise performance-enhancing drugs so that they can be regulated and athletes on the way up - whose entourages do not yet include savvy physiotherapists and doctors - don't overdose and do themselves damage."
Carl Thomen, PhD candidate in Sports Philosophy at the University of Gloucestershire, wrote the following in a Feb. 28, 2009 email to ProCon.org:
"With reference to performance-enhancing drugs, if we have discarded the useless 'unfair advantage' argument because of an unbiased look at the inherently technologically unfair nature of professional sport, we are really only left with worries about harm to athletes. Please note: harm to athletes, not breast augmentation patients, Viagra users or the spaced-out Ritalin generation. We don't worry when the Isle of Man TT race or the Vendee Globe claims another life, or when that boxer on the news gets Alzheimer's. And when innocent Canadian soldiers are shot by American pilots buzzing on Army-sanctioned ephedrine, we're still convinced that sport is somehow exempt from the influence of the natural human desire for constant improvement.
The rationalization is that it is okay for pilots to take performance-enhancing drugs, for musicians to use Beta blockers and for our children to swallow Ritalin because performance is paramount. But where are our health concerns now? Perversely, we deny the 'performance is paramount' principle in professional sport while citing health concerns about performance-enhancing drugs. We want better performances from our sports heroes all the time, but demonize the methods used to produce such performances while hiding behind concerns for health that are not commensurate with our normal paternalistic attitudes."
Bengt Kayser, MD, PhD, Professor of Exercise Physiology in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva, Alexandre Mauron, PhD, Professor of Bioethics in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva, and Andy Miah, PhD, Reader in New Media and Bioethics in the School of Media, Language, and Music at the University of the West of Scotland, wrote the following in their Dec. 2005 article "Viewpoint: Legalisation of Performance-Enhancing Drugs," published in The Lancet:
"We believe that rather than drive doping underground, use of drugs should be permitted under medical supervision... The boundary between the therapeutic and ergogenic - ie, performance enhancing - use of drugs is blurred at present and poses difficult questions for the controlling bodies of antidoping practice and for sports doctors. The antidoping rules often lead to complicated and costly administrative and medical follow-up to ascertain whether drugs taken by athletes are legitimate therapeutic agents or illicit.
...Furthermore, legalisation of doping, we believe, would encourage more sensible, informed use of drugs in amateur sport, leading to an overall decline in the rate of health problems associated with doping. Finally, by allowing medically supervised doping, the drugs used could be assessed for a clearer view of what is dangerous and what is not..."
Radley Balko, Senior Editor of Reason magazine, wrote in his Jan. 23, 2008 article titled "Should We Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports?," published in Reason:
"Sports is about exploring and stretching the limits of human potential. Going back even to the pre-modern Olympics, when athletes ate live bees and ate crushed sheep testicles to get a leg up on the competition, sports has never been some wholesome display of physical ability alone. Ingenuity, innovation, and knowledge about what makes us faster and stronger (and avoiding what might do more harm than good) has always been a part of the game...
...A free society isn't really free at all if it doesn't include the freedom to make what some may believe are bad decisions."
Kate Schmidt, former US Olympic javelin thrower, wrote the following in her Oct. 18, 2007 article titled "Just Say Yes to Steroids - Learn, Make Better Choices," published in the Los Angeles Times:
"In the same way that we have learned about injury prevention and safety, we need performance drugs exposed to the hot light of public scrutiny. We need to legitimize their use. With a more realistic view of our elite athletes, parents and kids can make more informed choices about their extracurricular activities.
The technology exists to test for levels of most of the substances on the 'banned drugs' lists. What if we declared that certain levels of them in the body were acceptable, while excessive amounts would result in penalties? Athletes could satisfy their drive to be faster and stronger. Drugs could move from the black market to the legitimate sports-medicine community. Athletes could stop experimenting on themselves. It would be safer to take the substances, and with medical monitoring, there would be fewer negative side effects... Track gets faster, nutrition gets more specific and training techniques improve."
Richard Callicott, former Chief Executive of UK Sport, stated in a Nov. 1, 2003 article titled "Yes or No? Question of the Week: Drugs in Sport," published in The Times (London):
"As the national anti-doping agency we will never accept this. Performance-enhancing drugs are not only prohibited because they violate the spirit of sport but because they can damage the health of athletes. The idea of allowing them in sport could lead to a situation whereby sportsmen and women are used as human guinea pigs for a constant flow of new, unregulated substances. The long-term effects don't bear thinking about."
Thomas H. Murray, PhD, President of the Hastings Center, wrote the following in his 2008 chapter titled "Sports Enhancement" in From Birth to Death and Bench to Clinic: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns, published by The Hastings Center:
"There are several reasons to ban performance-enhancing drugs: respect for the rules of sports, recognition that natural talents and their perfection are the point of sports, and the prospect of an 'arms race' in athletic performance...
Sports that revere records and historical comparisons (think of baseball and home runs) would become unmoored by drug-aided athletes obliterating old standards. Athletes, caught in the sport arms race, would be pressed to take more and more drugs, in ever wilder combinations and at increasingly higher doses...
The drug race in sport has the potential to create a slow-motion public health catastrophe. Finally, we may lose whatever is most graceful, beautiful, and admirable about sport..."
Joe Lindsey, contributing writer for Bicycling magazine, wrote in an Oct. 23, 2008 email to ProCon.org:
[T]he school of thought that advocates legalizing doping, or holds that an athlete has the right to choose whether to endanger his health, is ignoring a completely separate ethical and legal question: should people have the right to use a substance that is not legal for human use under ANY circumstances? The answer cannot be anything other than 'No.' And if that is the case, then we have drawn a line where some substances are OK to take, and others are not. And if that's the case, then what's the difference, philosophically, in where that line is drawn - that more or less substances are deemed banned? The only difference is a world where the semblance of fair play remains, where sports remain the end product of hard work, determination and talent, and a world where sports becomes merely pharmaceutically fueled entertainment. We can choose that world if we like, but with the knowledge that the cost is sports as inspirational and transformative, indicative of the best traits of us as people. Choose that road, and sport is no longer sport, no more noble an endeavor than, say, 'The Apprentice.'"
Russell Meldrum, MD, Associate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine, wrote the following in his Spring 2002 article titled "Drug Use by College Athletes: Is Random Testing an Effective Deterrent?," published in Sport Journal:
"Drug use is a serious concern, not only for the concepts of integrity and fair play in competitive sports, but because of the health threats to the athletes. Certainly drug testing programs should continue with increasing numbers of athletes being tested and increasing penalties for detection, since these are most likely means of deterrence. Drug education programs must also continue in a further attempt to curtail the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs by empowering the young athlete with the information and skills to make responsible and healthy decisions."
George Michael, Creator and former host of Sports Machine on NBC, stated the following in the Jan. 15, 2007 debate titled "We Should Accept Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Competitive Sports," aired on National Public Radio (NPR):
"Baseball owners paid $370 million to players who were not able to play. Most of them according to Dr. Andrews, were related to their use of anabolic steroids. And you now want to admit--legalize it, and govern it?...
Here's the bottom line. I am not willing to pay the price for legalizing steroids and performance-enhancing drugs, because I've seen too often what it can do. I don't want to go to the cemetery and tell all the athletes who are dead there, hey guys, soon you'll have a lot more of your friends coming, because we're going to legalize this stuff. The only good news out of it? They wouldn't hear the news. Because they're all dead."
Robert Simon, PhD, Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College, stated the following in a Dec. 9, 2004 live internet chat with USA Today readers titled "Drugs in Sports: Robert Simon":
"I would argue that prohibition [of performance enhancing drugs] is justified because (1) steroid use makes little sense if everyone uses; gains are minimal and everyone is exposed to the risks, (2) how your body reacts to a steroid is not an athletic talent like running or hitting, and (3) it's worth protecting the ideal of sport as a healthy pursuit."
