I disagree. Taken to the extreme, it would introduce a certain percent likelyhood of seeing a fatality during any individual game.
That’s another good thing about the policy.
I believe athletes should be able to take any steps necessary to improve their performance. I don’t think they should be allowed to use PEDs while playing, but if they want to take steroids to build muscle off season, then they should. It’s no different than relying on arthroscopic surgery and modern exercise equipment.
Well, we know the Russians have been selectively breeding weight lifters for decades.
Such consequences are unfortunate. We do things to minimize them, such as making the players wear helmets and padding, and having rules against unnecessary roughness. If we could do more to protect the players without spoiling the game, we should. For me, if too many players got hurt, it would make the whole sport too much of a downer.
If doping is permitted, and if it does confer a significant competitive advantage along with its dangers, then pro athletes aren’t going to have much choice: they’ll have to dope if they want to have a career. I don’t want that.
And only a poopypants would disagree with me. 
And I’m not of that opinion. For one thing, you wouldn’t be giving informed consent, if we don’t yet know all the dangers of a particular drug, as is often the case. More importantly, I believe we have responsibilities, to ourselves, our families, and our communities, to take care of ourselves.
Most of the top guys do it anyhow these days and finding ways around the detection one way or the other.
However, making it legal will make a bad example and will make it problematic portraying sport as healthy.
My views on this are sort of complex, but as simply as I can put it, I think PEDs should be legal, but I think they should be enforced, or not, at the level of the organization that handles the sport.
Let’s look at an example without getting into science fiction realm and consider powerlifting. Many of them dope, but that’s not the point I want to explore. Instead, I want to consider the suits and shirts they use. First, they undeniably provide an advantage, since the world records for bench and squat are considerably higher with suits than without. Second, they’re something that is completely obvious that someone is using or not using and different competitions will permit or deny different types of equipment. And, among those who follow powerlifting, some are excited to see whatever the highest weight is someone can move, regardless of what kind of equipment they use, and some think any equipment is illegitimate. As a result, you have different records surrounding the different rules and the fans can argue about which ones are more or less impressive.
That’s very much how I feel about PEDs. Some people want to see the biggest, strongest guys possible, some want to see the best “natural” athletes. I really don’t have a problem with a league legitimizing PEDs, I just want them to be honest about their usage and have strict guidelines on what is and is not allowed and enforcing it. As it is right now, when I watch football or baseball, I can’t really say if someone is that good because they use drugs or not. It’s quite possible the best natural batter in baseball is someone I’ve never heard of because everyone above him uses PEDs and he doesn’t. More likely, there’s a lot of mediocre players who don’t get any attention precisely because they’re mediocre, and they either feel like they have to use PEDs to compete or in order to even get into the league in the first place. Even as it stands now, it seems like athletes have to search for that edge and the perception that so many other players are doing it doesn’t help. If everyone was just honest about it, and if there were enough demand for separate leagues or whatnot, maybe people would feel like they have to do it and then hide it.
And specifically to the record books, as said, comparing across eras just doesn’t make sense. Would Babe Ruth have hit so many homeruns against a black pitcher? What about times when the mound was raised or lowered, how do you account for that in home run productivity? No one seems to complain too much about the rampant amphetamine usage in profession sports in the 80s, but everyone is upset about steroids and HGH in the 90s and 00s. Hell, the story of Gatorade talks about how much of an advantage using it over water helped those teams, were they using a “performance enhancer” that gave them an “unfair advantage”?
Sure, personally, I’d rather watch what I think of as the peak of natural human ability, which excludes PEDs but I’d rather watch honest PED users than dishonest ones mixed in with honest non-users.
Here is why I feel that drug-doping (like steroids, HGH, etc.) should remain outlawed in sports. Let’s assume that proper nutrition are not dangerous activities. So athletes that are better because they eat better or train harder do not have an unfair advantage because I can do the same thing. I would even put blood doping in this category*. With drug-doping, an athlete must make a choice between not being competitive or engaging in an unsafe (long term) process. No one should ever be forced to make that choice.
*Except there the argument may be that the amount of RBC is artificially inflated and that is kind of the antithesis of athletes being expected to be in the best physical condition through natural means such as high altitude training.
I assure you that many sports are absolutely horrible for the body long-term, particularly vigorous contact sports including both types of football. They are also unnecessarily risky–i.e., care a larger risk than simply doing moderate exercise for the sake of good health.
Athletes are not in athletics because it’s good for them. They are there to compete because they love the competition. And the choice they make is trade-off of poorer health for the love and glory of competition.
It is simply not a tenable argument to say that we should outlaw doping because it’s bad for you, anymore than we outlaw football because of its toll on the brain and joints.
On a side note, I’ll say that I don’t think doping is particularly bad for you. I admit that I base this on the notion that if it were bad for you, we’d see a lot more athletes dropping like flies. I’m pretty sure it’s common. Do we have any bad Tour de France stories out there? If so, I’d like to hear them. And for much of the history of the T d F, if you didn’t dope, you didn’t compete.
I do not think legitimizing doping would make sports boring any more than any other mechanisms to improve the level of play has made them boring.
And I agree with Ekers that allowing doping would make for a good laboratory, with positive spin offs for the rest of us.
Well thanks, Mom!
But I’m all growed up now, and I’d like to take responsibility for my own life, including an assessment of whether or not any given behavior or activity is too risky.
I deeply appreciate you giving me my life. But can it be mine, now, please? I’ll still wear a helmet when I remember, and give up bungee jumping in the developing world where the cords are not checked frequently enough.
The difference is in choosing to engage in risky behavior/activities knowing the risks and being effectively forced to put your health in jeopardy in order to function at the same level the dopers do.
The thinking that something is yours and thus you have the right to do whatever you want with it, no matter the harm to others, is quite childish, so it’s kinda hard not to sound like a parent when you debunk it.
You can at most choose to risk yourself, and even that is debatable, as risking yourself harms society by taking you out of it unnecessarily when you could have contributed something that might have helped. We’re all here because society has decided that it’s better for us to be alive than dead. (It’s generally based on principles like “Thou shalt not murder”, but that’s what it really boils down to: consensus morality.)
Yeah, or they can just choose not to pursue Olympic- or professional-level sports.
I don’t see that anyone would be forced to used PEDs were they legal. People would choose to use them, or not.
It’s legal to be born with natural aptitude but not everyone is. It’s legal to sleep in a hyperbaric chamber, live at a high-altitude training camp, and have an entourage of sports medicine people following you around but not everyone is forced to do so. And not everyone has the option to do so. And yet, people who have none of these things compete. If you want to be a linebacker you will suffer many, many head injuries and your health will probably be wrecked but many choose to be linebackers.
Truth is, PEDs won’t take your average Joe and turn him into an Olympian but they might make one Olympian slightly better than another Olympian. People will say that you shouldn’t have to subject yourself to the consequences (which apparently can be mitigated if all the guys getting away with it are any indication) of PEDs to compete but the upper echelons of athletes subject themselves willingly to injury and lives of monastic dedication because they have chosen victory as the highest priority.
Sports are mercenary. We like to project noble ideals onto them but, really, winning is all that matters for the history books. If popping pills allows you to shave a tenth of a second off the world record I say get popping. Maybe some guy who isn’t using PEDs will beat you; all the more impressive for him.
I don’t believe that last sentence is true. People respond differently to PEDs, sometimes by quite a lot. EPO and cycling is a great example since you brought up VO2 max.
Here is Jonathan Vaughters talking about it during an interview for Bicycling Magazine. Note that I think you can also find some backing for Vaughters statements from doctors and others on the scientific side, but I’d have to really search to locate them. This article was just handy.
There is also the cost of doping programs. Maybe to most pro football players it doesn’t matter, but if you’re talking about allowing any adult at non-amateur level to dope then you have an issue with those having money being able to outspend those who don’t, which tilts the playing field instead of leveling it.
This is also shown in cycling where a star like Armstrong could afford to have the best program and doctors, plus make sure all his teammates doped to support him. The average Pro Tour salary is something like €150000 with the minimum around €40000 and in Europe it is more of a working-class sport. Being able to run a team-wide and well-tested program and paying millions of dollars to doping doctors to help with the program was a huge advantage. Many pro riders simply can’t afford to spend that much on doping.
But if I want to compete in the NFL at the competitive level, I have put my health in jeopardy at the same level the others do.
This is a consequence of sports. And I don’t have to choose to go down that avenue of competition if I think it is not worth the health risk.
Cost is not a persuasive argument.
We do nothing to equalize the cost of any other area. We don’t put a limit on how much to pay for your equipment, your training, your coach…anything at all.
There’s nothing in professional sports that tries to be egalitarian about costs. In fact, if a competitor has access to something expensive and useful, they use it. They don’t say, “The next guy can’t afford it, so it’s not fair. I’ll abstain.” Instead, it’s “Find a way to get me that super uper duper bicycle.”
Uh…I’m thinking my life is mine and you can’t have it to control. I get to be fat, I get to not take my insulin, I get to have my abortion, I get to smoke and I get to be undermotivated to contribute to society.
Society gets to say, “Well, Mr Pedant, then we are not going to take care of you.” Or they can say, “Well, Mr Pedant, you must have had a horribly abusive childhood to harbor such self-destructive feelings. Permit us to take care of you anyway.”
But um…like it or not, my life is mine to squander. And many do.
More to the point here, it’s my life to choose the greatest good for. Your greatest good might be safety and longevity. Mine might be glory and BASE jumping. Butt out of mine, please, with your consensus morality.
If you are unwilling to do so, then start making a heck of lot of things illegal. Start with contact sports, because although they are fun, they are more dangerous than treadmilling at home for your health. So if your consensus morality says I can’t eat fries, then you can’t skydive.
PS: The jails are gonna fill up pretty fast, no? (Unless I am successful in getting the consensus to give back to the individual his right of privacy to his own life and choices.)
If drug use isn’t prohibited, it will become more-or-less mandatory for many professional athletes, with ever greater doses, more extreme treatments, and more dangerous combinations of drugs being needed just to compete, let alone challenge for the top spots.
The death toll would probably rise very quickly at first, with any number of the foolish and the desperate committing suicide for the sake of a shot at the big time. But that would be nothing compared to the longer-term consequences, as the compounded damage done to athletes’ bodies in their competitive days leads to an epidemic of health issues and premature fatalities further down the line.
And, being well aware of all this, athletes themselves are the ones who are most keen on maintaining the controls. Even those of them who are doping at this time know that abolition would force them to dope much harder to keep up, increasing the risks exponentially.
So, on the one hand we have massively increased health risks and the objections of those affected, and on the other hand we have… 
The difference is that the decision to pick football is a free choice while the choice to dope is a forced choice based on competition.
I have not read any replies, but off-hand I would say the reason to ban doping drugs (or many of them) are the same as for banning other dangerous drugs such as cocaine or heroin, they kill people.
Another reason, perhaps not as important, is that as fans, we prefer watching humans compete, not souped up automatons. Juicing is not sport, it’s science or animal husbandry.