Is it time to consider legalizing drugs in sports?

With the breathlessly racist publicity campaign surrounding the publication of a book that alleges Barry Bonds began using performance enhancing drugs following the 1998 baseball season in full swing and truly scary performance enhancement schemes just over the horizon, perhaps now is a good time to look at the drug scandals in sports from a different angle.

Everyone assumes the bottom line motivation for the existence of so-called dope cheats in sports is money. This is only partially correct. Even before money became a factor in the Olympic Games for instance, Thomas Hicks of the USA was injected with strychnine during the middle of the marathon before going on to win the gold medal during the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis. He was the first Olympic athlete on record to have used performance-enhancing drugs.

During the Cold War political and national prestige were in some cases motivators for the use of drugs by athletes. The former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) gave anabolic steroids to some athletes, many who are now attempting to sue the current government for what they endured.

Today, however, especially in light of the power of television as a medium and the prospect of instant wealth, the rewards of being the best in many sports is so great that the temptation to secure an edge over a rival is greater than ever before.

In a February 16, 2006 article in London's Financial Times, Don Catlin of UCLA who did the drug testing for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics is quoted as saying, "Everything we do assumes the athletes are guilty, meanwhile the ones who are really clever get away with it anyway."

In the United States the issue of drug cheating often takes on racist implications. In no other case was this more obvious than the differences in the puffball treatment white baseball great Mark McGuire was accorded in regard to steroid allegations and the constant, nagging, vilification baseball publicists, posing as sports journalists, hurl at Bonds.

The racism goes beyond that. To the degree that sports serves as an economic equalizer in America and elsewhere, Blacks will be under more pressure to get that "extra edge" than whites. For whites, sport is often a stepping-stone of convenience. For Blacks it is a stepping-stone of necessity. But yet, who are the big sports dopers we mostly hear about besides Barry Bonds. Well, they are Black. Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Kelli White, Sammy Sosa, the list goes on.

Naturally, in the sports dominated by whites where there\'s big money at stake (bicycling, skiing), whites go for the gold and the enhancer as well. But in those sports the media soft-pedals the issue. Lance Armstrong, hello?

Clearly drugs are as much a part of life as they appear to be of sport. In the 1970's when Henry Kissinger was jetting throughout the world as an imperial U.S. secretary of state he often took prescription temazepam to minimize the effects of jet lag and to maximize his political performances.

Many classical musicians employ various beta breakers to enhance their ability to concentrate and to retard their nervousness. Need we mention Viagra and its' progeny? The use of drugs to elevate the physical and mental ability of human beings is accepted without question in numerous tasks of daily life. Technology in the improvement of life is accepted in all spheres of life. If you are an athlete however, and especially if you're Black, you can be denied your source of income for using something as innocuous a Vicks inhaler.

As trite as it may sound the only reason drug usage in sport is illegal is because we say it is.

Furthermore, the goal of "cleaning up" sport is unattainable as should now be clear to all after witnessing for the past 20 years the cat and mouse ritual enacted between athletes and various doping agencies.

As already stated abuse of anabolic steroids and perhaps even monitored use of steroids can cause lasting damage or death. Other forms of supervised doping however cause no damage.

The ability to perform well in sporting events is determined by the ability to deliver oxygen to muscles. Oxygen is carried by red blood cells. The more red blood cells, the more oxygen you can carry. This in turn controls an athlete's performance in aerobic exercise. EPO (erythropoietin) is a natural hormone that stimulates red blood cell production, raising the packed cell volume (PCV)-the percentage of the blood comprised of red blood cells, says the British Journal of Sports Medicine. EPO is produced in response to anemia, hemorrhage, pregnancy or simply living in high altitudes. Athletes began injecting recombinant EPO in the 1970's, and it was officially banned in 1985.

The journal argues that while unsafe drugs should still be banned the prime focus of sports authorities should be the health of the athlete. "If a drug does not expose an athlete to excessive risk, we should allow it even if it enhances performance."

As technology advances and as the internalization of it become more and more socially acceptable sports authorities and the public need to develop a more realistic attitude toward drugs in sport, if for no other reason than the next generation of sport doping is already on the horizon if it has not already arrived.

That would be gene doping or gene enhancement. "Athletes resorting to this form of enhancement would be injected with a particular gene intended to improve the function of a normal cell and boost their performance," writes David Owen, sports editor of the Financial Times.

Scientists have already experimented with gene therapies that would facilitate muscle growth spurts and increase the speed of damaged muscle repair.

The World Anti Doping Agency (WADA), which was created in 1999 by the International Olympic Committee, does not believe this stage has yet been reached, but it is not sure. In early February of this year at the trial of a German track coach evidence surfaced that perhaps this level of doping has already occurred. Meanwhile WADA is spending $3m a year to ensure that testers will be able to detect cases of genetic doping should they start to materialize.

The issue of legalizing sport doping raises many serious questions that lead to discussions of a futuristic human identity, brains augmented by computer chips, physical characteristics designed for athletic performance. These are issues in which the sports world, a community not previously known for deep thinking, and the rest of the world as well, must soon engage.

Meanwhile, the current status of doping in sports is untenable, unrealistic and unfair. As Julian Savulescu, a professor of practical ethics at Oxford University observed, "These days the athlete who wins is the athlete with the best chemist and the best lawyer." Guilty or not of using performance enhancing drugs, Barry Bonds should have no problem agreeing with that.

© March 2006 By Afromerica