Change the Law about Athletes and Drugs

Great Debates
1

Why shouldn’t athletes use drugs to make them better? Look I watch sports to see the best and it takes drugs to be the best. Ben Johnson was able to run faster by using drugs. Mark Maguire was able to hit homeruns using drugs (he says only legal drugs, but image what he could do with the most powerful steroids on the Earth.) Sure these drugs would hurt the athletes in the end, but everyone needs to make sacrifices to be the best. A physicist who wants to be the best has to take time to study, meaning he can’t get enough exercise. Also reading all that small text has a bad effect on his eyes. Why do we continue to baby athletes? Have them make sacrifices to be the best. Until athletes start using drugs and blood doping techniques we will only be seeing the second best.

To achieve this end we need to have the laws of this country changed to make performance enhancing drugs legal for athletes. This is America and we deserve to see the best.

Any differing views?

2

SO you want to encourage peole to kill themselves so you can see checmically enhanced peak performance? There are sacrifices and there are sacrifices. There is difference in encouraging people to be the best the can be and encouraging to them to commit to slow suicide for your amusement.

3

Nobody would force the athletes to use the drugs. We already encourage them to use PE drugs. High numbers of baseball players are believed to use PE drugs. If someone wants to compete without drugs that is fine, we should just stop preventing adults from using PE drugs if they choose to. Who are we to tell these athletes they can’t be the best they can be and who is the government to tell us we can’t have the best?

4

Nobody will force them, but the environment you are proposing would force them; it would become impossible for drug-free athletes to compete at the same level as enhanced ones; there would only be the choice of taking drugs or not bothering with athletics at all.

5

Would you object to two leagues the drug league and the non-drug league?

6

I don’t think your comparison is valid BZ00000. Your comparison is an invalid one for many reasons. There are no comparable performance enhancing drugs for brains as there are for muscles. You make a weak point that a sedentary lifestyle is unhealthy but it’s nowhere near on par with the potential damage from steriods and even then somone who gets a little exercise now and then may be at an advantage to someone who never leaves a book.

I’ll leave drug laws as separate debate but I’m in favor of leaving steroids a controlled substance. I think athletics should be a contest opf people, not people who are willing to abuse chemicals.

7

WhatEVER - I just don’t see the point; athletics, like sport in general, is supposed to be about pushing the limits of what a human can do, in my personal opinion, achieving that by means such as performance-enhancing drugs detracts from the achievement, rather than adding to it, as you suggest.

To be fair though, I suppose the same argument could be applied to performance-enhancing shoes.

8

Exactly, we use all forms of things that enhance performance, including equipment, food, etc.

Now, these don’t harm the athletes and drugs do so how are they are different. But the very nature of some sports harm the athletes. It is silly to say you can harm yourself this way, but not this way. You can enhance your performance this way, but not this way.

The use of PE equipment in my eyes is more a destruction of the idea of a sport is what an athlete can do. PE drugs will only add to the performance of the body, a good pair of shoes changes everything in running for instance.

Look at female gymnasts and how they starve themselves to remain small. This harms them, should this practice be illegal?

9

I don’t even know what this would mean.

It should say: Now, these don’t harm the athletes and drugs do so they are different.

10

My first thought is that this is a poorly constructed and idiotic satire thread. But, then I see it is written by BZ00000, so I don’t really know what to think.

Using performance enhancing drugs is essentially cheating. The leagues ban it because it creats an uneven playing field, is (in most cases) illegal under state/federal law, and is just plain unhealthy. Regardless, you are allowed your opinion on this stance.

But, if drugs are legal, then:
-Cork the bats. You want to see home run records. Let players doctor the bat to get 30-40 extra feet out of every hit. Who wants to see singles when everything can be a homer neat.
-Continue to bring in the already close fences. Screw great diving catches or mad dashes to 3rd. Let’s just change the game to see athletes “at their best.”
-Get rid of the infield dirt. Everyone knows you can run faster on specially made tracks. Replace the dirt with a specially designed compound. Steals will go way up.
-Let the pitcher take a toolbelt to the mound. Hey, if hitters get to “be the best”, then so do the pitchers. Cutters, spit balls, a little sandpaper. Make that ball dance and be unhittable. What a thrill.

In short, your idea is moronic. Rules (such as banned substances) exist to give structure and integrity to a game/sport. What you want to see is a Nintendo game. I want to see someone reaching amazing achievements based on skill, effort, hard work, and God given ability. That is an impressive achievement. What you want to see is a travesty of athletic achievement where each feat should be greater than the last resulting in all of them meaning nothing.

Go spend a couple hundred dollars on a Playstation 2. Buy a baseball game. Play for hours on end at the expense of your positively brimming social life. Rejoice as you hit computerized homer after homer and know that you are seeing the best.

11

Funny, you based your whole argument on equipment/field size changes which I said I was against. PE drugs won’t destroy any sport. It is the same as conditioning. Are you against conditioning because it makes the players too strong? Or gives them too much endurance? They are performance enhancing drugs, not performance creating drugs.

Also the playing field is already uneven as PE drugs are being used in your example baseball. Removing the rules will remove the uneven playing field as all athletes will be free to make the same choices without the external pressure of an arbitrary rule.

12

The use of performance enhancing drugs in sports competition is one of the few areas where I agree with current prohibitive drug laws.

What would be the point of competition? To determine who’s figured out the best mix of steroids and stimulants?

13

And I am trying to point out that your entire argument is essentially changing the equipment used. Granted the equipment is genetically modified human, but equipment nonetheless.

There really is no difference between using a doctored bat and using a doctored body. By and large, people enjoy watching what other people are able to do with their skills based on effort and desire, not based on how many times they are willing to shoot up or how pure their back alley doctor can create a steroid.

14

But it is already happening! Effort and desire? Get real. No matter how much effort and desire I put forth I will never run a mile sub 3:50. Nor will I be able to do it with PE drugs. PE drugs only take the best and make them better, they don’t create the best. Are you really saying that if I started taking PE drugs I could win a gold medal? Diet and high altitude can enhance performance as much as PE drugs are able to, are these things ok?

Do PE drugs genetically modify a human? Cite.

15

That should be high altitude training.

16

You have to admit, from a sci-fi standpoint - it makes an interesting mental picture to think of Monday Night Football, featuring crazed 500-lbm steroid, horse testosterone, and PCP-fueled behemoths battling to the death…

17

Nah - too expensive to create. Those would the specialist gladiators.

I realize the futility of this debate. BZ00000 has framed it in such a way that he can recieve no criticism. That it, it is his real assertion that more or less anything, regardless of how destructive, is allowable in the pursuit of exceptional physical excellence. there is no way to debate without challenging that Axiom. So long as he feels like it, he can contend that Axiom is correct.

There is no argument that will change his mind.

18

The problem with trying to ban performance-enhancing drugs is that our bodies are already producing many of these chemicals, and certainly not in a very “fair” way.

Consider an old case that is likely to be hotly discussed in a few years time: the finnish cross-country skier Eero Mäntyranta, who won multiple gold medals in the world championships and the olympic games in the early 1960s. He was at the time seen as a “miracle” skier, especially given that he had needed comparatively little training to reach (and maintain) his world championship level performance.

Subsequent research has shown that Mäntyranta lacks a gene for a protein that regulates the activity of the body’s EPO-gene. In other words, his EPO-gene is constantly “turned on,” which means that his body is constantly producing EPO, a performance-enhancing substance that increases the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells.

Does this mean that Mäntyranta did not deserve his gold medals?

Should today’s athletes be tested for Mäntyranta’s gene deficiency (and prohibited from competing if they have this genetic condition)?

If yes, why should we limit testing to only the EPO gene? Should we not also be looking at the genes that help regulate muscle mass, and so on?

If no, how is this different from allowing EPO injections (which are currently banned)?

Due to genetic variation, the athletic playing field is already extremely unlevel. Furthermore, this “problem” is likely to get much worse as reliable genetic engineering for adults may be just around the corner. (Indeed, several biotech companies are already working on EPO gene therapy as a way to treat amenia–how many of you believe that this will not be a very popular treatment among endurance sport athletes?) It may be very hard or even impossible to detect if someone has undergone such treatment. I believe that we may have to accept this and learn to live with the thought that equality in sports is an illusion.

The only other long-term alternative, it seems to me, would be the establishment of fixed parameters for what is “standard,” allowable human genetic characteristics and blood content for athletes that wish to participate in competitions. Indeed, some organizations have already started walking down this path by establishing a maximum hemotocrit level (percent of total blood volume that is made up of red blood cells). But, do we really want to continue down this path? It seems to me that it will lead to nasty places. A variant of this would be the creation of different “genetic classes” of athletes, but this seems to open up the same can of worms as rules for “standard allowable genes” with regard to implementation and possibility of stigmatization.

I believe that PE drugs and PE therapy in sports is here to stay. You may not like it, but you would probably like the long-term preventive measures a lot less.

19

Why should we care about athletic performance in the first place?

20

Nobody forces women who want to be successful as models to starve themselves into anorexia, or purge themselves bulimic, all in the hopes that they’ll become top models.

Telling people they need to become their absolute best in order to succeed is a good thing. Telling themselves they have to do it by taking harmful drugs is a bad thing.

There’s a reason why they don’t allow smoking ads on TV any more. If you tell people they’ll be cool and popular if they smoke, then they’ll smoke. If we started telling people they could become multimillionaire athletes if they took steroids, they’d be taking steroids by the fistful.