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It is some time in the future in a new sporting era. The authorities have stopped chasing drug cheats after conceding that they can never catch up in a U-turn of record-breaking proportions the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has decided not only to legalise but also to actively promote performance-enhancing drugs in an commercial appeal This scenario could be more than a mere hallucination. Even now we need to acknowledge that the fight to eliminate performance enhancing chemicals from sport, like the wider war on drugs, may be impossible to win Instead of banning substances, and the athletes caught using them the solution is not to proscribe at all.

To date, the IOC has declared more than 1500 drugs off-limits to competitive athletes The list includes all the usual suspects: the anabolic steroids and peptide hormones that promote muscle growth, stimulants like amphetamines and cocaine that can raise heart rate and diuretics that promote the excretion of fluids from the body and last-minute weight loss. Although the list seems unambiguous, the situation is confused by the fact that many of the proscribed chemicals either can be generated by our own metabolism, such as nandrolone, which players 15 produce under stressful conditions or can be taken inadvertently in over-the-counter (OTC) medicines and nutritional supplements.

Why do we subject our sportsmen and women to such high levels of scrutiny in the first place? Why are we so concerned with what athletes put in their bodies, and why do we not apply similar standards to other areas of human achievement? Why, for example, do we not subject the winners of Oscars, Grammy’s and Pulitzer Prizes to random dope tests? Many authors and artists have attributed their creativity at least in part, to the influence of illegal drugs. So why do we not brandish them as literary or musical cheats?

The demand for drugs will not go away so long as the remuneration remains very high Today, huge sponsorship deals await those who reach the peak of their chosen sport, helping to sustain the unscrupulous win-at-all costs philosophy. And far from ridding sport of the drug scourge, punitive measures have made an illicit industry grow ever more sophisticated. As long as new kinds of drugs continue to be developed, the athletes, or at least the richer ones will always be able to stay one step ahead of the testers.

We need to accept that we are fighting a futile battle and to acknowledge that drugs are as much a part of modern sport as spiked shoes and streamlined shorts. There is already much a a growing number of voices that argue that athletes should be permitted to use performance-enhancing drugs provided that they do not damage health. Additionally, if there are drugs out there that can give a competitive advantage, there will always be some athletes who are willing to take them whatever the accompanying dangers. If drugs were decriminalised, it would level the playing field and transform foul play into fair.

Success in sport is not just about will, effort and training. It is also about the genes you inherit from your parents and the environment in which you were raised. Drugs may offer an advantage to a competitor but so do many other attributes that could be considered just as inequitable Is a race that pits a man born to athletic parents and raised at altitude, with blood that can carry more oxygen, against a self-made athlete born and raised at sea level a fair competition? Our whole concept of a level playing field in sport is an idealistic notion that could do with some updating.

Adapted from Drugs in Sport – Raising the Bar’ by Martin Brookes.
Science in Society February 2004