The Case for Using Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDS) in Professional Sports
I recently read about a retired professional NFL player who confessed on a podcast that he had successfully cheated at drug testing while being an active player on a team. He explained how he knew the system well enough that he was able to successfully submit urine samples that were not his own. As I read about the confession of that retired player, my mind began to recall the many instances of elite professional athletes who were punished after testing positive for a prohibited substance of some kind that was believed to greatly enhance performance on the field of play.
I started thinking of names such as Maria Sharapova and Iga Swiatek (tennis), Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds (baseball), Lance Armstrong (cycling), Justin Gatlin (track and field), and others whose cautionary tales I read about over the years. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, the number of athletes at the highest levels who were punished over the years for using prohibited drugs is quite large.
Based on the idea that perhaps those who got caught cheating at using drugs represents the tip of the iceberg, I wonder: how many more professional athletes, beyond those who have been “caught,” have actually used, or are still using, PEDS to enhance their on-field performance, and have gotten away with it?
When I discussed this story with my wife, we had quite a long conversation on the issue of using PEDS in professional sports. I, who always enjoy playing the devil’s advocate, suggested that perhaps, since so many professional athletes seek to increase their performance ability by hook or by crook, PEDS use should be permitted at the professional level with the proper amount of medical oversight. In that manner, all those who seek to gain an unfair edge will no longer get that chance, as every player will be permitted to enhance their athletic performance as they see fit, while monitored by medical professionals, rendering the playing field “fair.”
My wife, on the other hand, argued that it is unethical to allow athletes to cheat and gain an unfair advantage over others, as, even in a controlled environment, there will always be “cheaters” who will push the boundaries of fairness. And besides, she insisted, the use of PEDS is detrimental to the health of the human body.
As we went back and forth presenting our points of view, I stuck to my position that allowing the use of PEDS will level the playing field while she held to her point that cheating should be punished and that any allowance will only result in even more cheating and prove detrimental to the overall health of the athletes in the long run. In the end, as we sometimes do, we agreed to disagree.
However, after further deliberation, I came away from that conversation more convinced that perhaps it may not be such a bad idea to allow our professional athletes to use some kind of regulated performance enhancing drugs that lead to increased levels of athletic achievement.
Professional sports (and I include Olympics sports within that category) is just one component of the trillion-dollar entertainment industry that includes movies, computer games, television, streaming platforms, music, and amusement parks, among others. As its own separate category of entertainment, professional sports has grown to become an almost indispensable part of our lives. We can easily see this in how much time and expense parents dedicate to sports by enrolling their children in youth sports, beginning as early as when the children are three and four years of age. Many parents dream of having their children grow up to be athletic champions, with some spending their life savings on lessons, camps, and sports gear.
As children grow and participate in sports, winning becomes more of a mandate, rather than a desire or prayer to the sports gods. This “peer pressure” brought on mostly by coaches, trainers and parents, causes some athletes to become obsessed with improving their performances on the field.
It comes as no surprise then that, beginning in high school, and sometimes earlier depending on the sport, some athletes discover the existence of performance enhancing drugs and some decide to seek such drugs. Just as some drug dealers target juveniles to get them hooked on addictive illegal drugs, there are also drug dealers that know how to peddle performance enhancing drugs. Sometimes, that drug dealer might be, not just a fellow athlete, but the team coach, or assistant coach, or trainer.
By the time they get to the ranks of college and professional sports, most athletes have developed skills and abilities that far exceed those of the “average” individual on the street. Because these athletes have risen to that highest possible level of performance, we average mortals are willing to dish out hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to sit and watch our favorite players or teams compete on the field of play. Or, we use those dollars to place bets on which team or player we think will perform best. And, because on-the-field performance becomes so significant to the revenue generation of the athletes and their teams at that high level of play, the pressure to excel athletically becomes almost overwhelming for some athletes.
Today, with the concept of NIL (name, image, likeness) pervading sports and athleticism down to the high school and in some cases junior high school levels, the pressure to perform is magnified even more as very young athletes with great potential are put in the public spotlight and offered outrageous monetary compensation even before they ever reach the ranks of the professionals. And, perhaps unfortunately, living in a TikTok world only serves to exacerbate that pressure.
But what does it mean to play sports at the professional level? From my point of view, most professional athletes get to that level because they have been “groomed” from childhood to love their sport above all else, basically sacrificing their bodies, their time, and sometimes their social life for the sake of the sport. And, if I focus on the physical punishment to which most athletes subject their bodies, the things that attracts most of us to watch a sporting competition are the physical risks that the athletes take and the manner in which they punish their bodies or the bodies of their opponents.
Whether it’s gymnastics, pole vaulting, marathon running, American football, basketball, wrestling, boxing, MMA, or hockey, professional-level athletes push their bodies to extreme physical limits. There have been countless cases over the years of professional athletes being severely injured while performing their sport, from simple broken bones to concussions, to paralysis, and even death, regardless of whether or not they used performance enhancers.
Even so, the excuse given by all sports authorities for the need to control the use of steroids or PEDS is that those substances are harmful to the health of the players. Wait: what? PEDS are detrimental to the health of the players but sacrificing their bodies for the sake of the sport, often experiencing life-long infirmities, and often for the sake of the millions of dollars in compensation, is not? What hypocrisy!
Unfortunately, hypocrisy is in our human nature. Every one of us is born a hypocrite. And I’m not even referring to politicians and Hollywood actors, but to each one of us who gleefully (especially anonymously online) points out the speck of dust that is in the eye of our neighbor or brother while our own eyes are obscured by a wooden beam (Matthew 7:3-5).
Recall how, in a previous article on alcoholism among the general population, I posed the question; can we function as a sober society? In that article I proposed that our society ought to find a way to reduce alcohol consumption due to the many deaths caused by alcoholism every year. Yet, I don’t feel that I’m being hypocritical in any way whatsoever when I advocate for the use of PEDS in a medically controlled environment. Allow me to expand on the logic behind my statement.
If we consider the way our medical “system” works, we quickly see that drugs are regulated by the medical community (or pharma industry) in such a way that medical professionals and scientists become the gatekeepers to the chemicals that we ought to ingest or absorb into our bodies. Our food, our medicines and other chemicals we ingest in one form or another are approved by the system we have in place that relies primarily on the knowledge and advice of medical professionals and scientists.
As such, certain chemicals are controlled such that only licensed doctors are permitted to prescribe them. This applies to drugs and chemicals administered by medical professionals, some of which may, nevertheless, lead to death. And, most controlled substances and chemicals have their side effects, some of which might, again, lead to an “early” death.
Since our lives are predicated on the chemicals we lose and those we add (as food or “medicines”) as we live out our lives, and on the exercise and sleep we provide to our bodies, it stands to reason that how long we live cannot be determined solely by the use of one type of drug alone. There are numerous examples of people who smoked cigarettes and lived to be over ninety years of age. Or of people who abused controlled substances early in their lives and managed to live past the age of eighty, well past “life expectancy.” And while scientists can very easily show the deleterious effects of steroids in laboratory mice, I have yet to see a study that provides real-world statistics on the life expectancy of, let’s say, professional football players who actually used PEDS vs those who did not use PEDS.
But, what if the use of PEDS in our professional athletes were permitted? Wouldn’t we want to see human performance increased to its utmost? What baseball fan wouldn’t want to see a powerhouse hitter hitting over a hundred homeruns in one season? Or a quarterback who can throw from one end zone to the opposite end zone? Or even a basketball player who could sink baskets from the opposite end of the court EVERY SINGLE TIME? We all want our hometown heroes to exhibit superhuman powers; that’s one reason sports are so popular.
In my opinion, professional sports represent the ideal laboratory for experimenting with enhancing human athletic abilities. Whether it’s increased strength or some other attribute that would create super humans, the environment in which athletes are getting paid outrageous sums of money to sacrifice their bodies for the good of the sport is the perfect place to figure out how we can make those athletes reach new heights in human physical performance through the purposeful and controlled use of PEDS or other drugs.
Some of you might counter that this sounds like using humans as experimental laboratory rats. But those athletes who are getting paid outrageous amounts of money to abuse their bodies physically are also all too eager to find ways to make themselves even better and more successful at playing the game.
In addition, think about all the legally approved ways in which humans are being used as experimental laboratory “mice” anyway: psychiatrists try new drugs on patients to get them to act “normal,” some humans voluntarily submit themselves for very little pay to test out new drugs, and humans ingest or absorb certain new drugs prescribed by their doctors that are intended to help the patients live “longer.” And we humans willingly submit our bodies to absorb those chemicals, often ignoring the side effects, and usually paying out of our hard-earned money, instead of being paid by our doctors. Basically, we are all already walking and breathing laboratory mice, paying our health insurance companies for the “privilege” of being told what to ingest and what is “good” for us.
But imagine if we tested performance enhancing drugs on the healthiest and fittest of our kind: our professional athletes. What might society or civilization gain from having athletes perform to their utmost through the regulated and controlled use of PEDS? Might we develop humans who can survive the radiation of spaceflight? How about humans who can hold their breath underwater for hours? Can enhancing human performance lead to humans becoming more survivable in extreme climates?
Maybe NASA is already working on addressing these issues. But I think professional athletes provide a ready-made laboratory in which the “mice” are eager and willing to become subjects in an experiment with great implications for the future of humanity.
Naturally, when these super-athletes break all kinds of records there will be asterisks placed next to their achievements indicating that these records apply to a new era of sports. Nevertheless, they would indicate new levels of human performance that might someday in the very far future lead to our successful colonization of the cosmos.
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