Performance enhancing drugs that are good for you makes some valid points but misses one key point: the most famous performance-enhancing drugs we already have, steroids, are already safe in therapeutic doses — they’re used for male hormone replacement and for mass-gain/retention in AIDS patients — and they’re particularly healthful for athletes trying to recover from tremendous training stresses:
One of the big sports scandals of 2003 was the discovery that athletes were using a designer steroid called THG [*] that was undetectable with the current tests. Subsequently we got to enjoy the usual gnashing of teeth about how drug use was destroying sports.
The standard argument for why performance enhancing drugs are bad looks something like this:
- The drugs are bad for you.
- People shouldn’t have to take health risks in order to compete.
There’s an obvious problem with this line of argument: training is bad for you. It’s true that getting some exercise is good for you, but the training loads used by elite athlets are well beyond that point. When you’re training 20+ hours a week, you’re at serious risk for overuse injuries. There’s also evidence that overtraining leads to immune system depression [*]. In fact, one of the major limiting factors in the performance of elite athletes is how much they’re able to train before their performance (and health) starts to decline due to overtraining, so athletes already have to take health risks in order to be competitive.
It’s not clear how true the first half of the argument is, either. Not all of the performance enhancing drugs are bad for you in therapeutic doses. Take a look at the International Cycling Union’s list of prohibited substances. All the major stimulants are banned, including Ritalin (methylphenidate), which ADD patients take every day. The World Anti-Doping Agency even bans pseudoephedrine, which is a common decongestant used in a large number of cold medicines. There’s a lot of debate about whether steroids are actually that bad for you, but there’s no serious debate about whether pseudoephedrine is.
Worse yet, it’s only a matter of time before some doping agent comes out that’s actually good for you. It’s easy to imagine such an agent, say something that would improve your recovery time from training, build more muscle with less training load (suggested by Kevin Dick) or keep your immune system high even under high training loads. Are those drugs going to be banned too? Based on the situation with pseudoephedrine, I’d say so. If and when that happens we’ll need a new rationale for why we’re doing it, though.