Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports: Ethical Debate

Introduction

Nowadays, athletes use drugs to increase their potential when it comes to showing their skills. However, these substances bring significant ethical and practical concerns.

Should Performance Enhancing Drugs (Such as Steroids) Be Accepted in Sports?

Arguments For Acceptance (Pro)

Pro 1

If steroid use for professional athletes is permitted, they will be able to legally obtain physical enhancement drugs which have been regulated, and are therefore possibly safe to use.

Pro 2

The important point is that as long as the participants are grown adults, making informed choices about the possible consequences, there should be no restriction on what sportsmen and women can do. We don't stop grown men punching each other senseless in the ring or putting their body in the path of a leather ball travelling at 95mph just because they could come to harm. We trust them to make the choice. So we should also let them take whatever substances they like to run faster or hit harder. Allowing doping and the rest would just make sport more entertaining – and more honest.

Pro 3

It's unclear why we continue to beat ourselves up over performance-enhancing drugs; it's not as if international sport has a great tradition of being pure and clean. Up until 1968 it was a free-for-all; over the next 20 years it was only moderately restricted, and even now the poachers seem light years ahead of the game-keepers.

Arguments Against Acceptance (Con)

Con 1

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.

Con 2

While the case for banning various types of drugs and other enhancers is strong, the ability to control doping is limited. For there is a continuing battle between bans and the discovery of new enhancers that have not been banned. The result is a fragile equilibrium between the banning of various substances, enforcement of bans, and the search for new substances and ways to evade bans on old substances. This is not a perfect outcome, but I believe it is on the whole better for competitive sports and for participants than a policy that allows all kinds of performance enhancers and stimulants.

Con 3

Doping is to sport very much like terrorism is to nations. It is insidious. OK, there's a lot of bad stuff that's always gone on in sports. But, at the core, we are always drawn to the physical majesty of the young men and women who do wondrous things with their bodies. Sport is art, aesthetics -- tabulated. We are outraged at games that are fixed. Drugs fix bodies. It's the same thing, and we know it.

Connectors for Argumentation

Use these transition words to structure your arguments:

• In the same way
• In the same manner
• However
• Finally
• In order to
• Consequently
• In addition
• Besides (A pesar de)
• Therefore