Tam writing an opinion piece about the argument in today’s sport world, the question, should performance enhancing drugs (PED’s) be legalised in professional sports? I am hoping to pull sport enthusiasts from the ‘ban doping’ side of the argument and look at the full picture long term. I will do this by showing them the positives of legalising PED’s. Should Performance Enhancing Drugs be Legalised in Professional Sports? For years there has been an ongoing argument about whether performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) should be legalised in professional sports.
The use of performance-enhancing drugs, commonly known as doping, has been happening behind the scenes. You hear about the athletes in the first Olympic Games (776 B. C. ) improving their fights and recovering quickly from fatigue and injuries during their battles by using hallucinogens and stimulants. In my opinion, PEDs should be legalised due to the fairer and higher quality matches they can create, and, in doing so, the obscene amounts of money paid by the government for the steroid tests will be eliminated.
This will allow us to channel these funds into more important things such as health care, salaries and assisting smaller countries with participating in worldwide events such as the Olympics. The primary reason why performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) are illegal, and have been for years in professional sports, is that they give users an unfair advantage over the rest of the field. Various professional sports leagues have attempted to set a level playing field by testing for drug use and suspending those found guilty.
But it’s clearly not working as lots of people are caught doping every year and the playing field is no longer level. To me the only way of leveling the playing field is by heading in the other direction and legalising performance enhancing drugs. Doing this would not only make the sport fairer as everyone is playing on an equal level, but would make sport watching more entertaining as the sport is now at a better level. By legalising PEDs athletes will be able to run faster, jump higher, tackle harder, kick the ball further, harder and faster.
Of course, if the athletes had something against taking PEDs they would still be able to play the sport, but they may be disadvantaged as the other players will now be reaching their own peak performance. Legalising PEDs will also cost the government and antidoping agencies less money as they now no longer need to worry about the quest to stop the use of PEDs. The cost of a basic steroid test is around $300 per individual. Then multiply this by the number of times a player undergoes testing each year (around 300,000 athletes) and the government is looking at spending millions of dollars per year on drug testing.
You would have thought that spending this much money on stopping the use of drugs, it would actually stop! But often these tests can’t even catch doping athletes. For example, Lance Armstrong, who was an avid doper, never tested positive for doping but rather was only caught after he admitted using illegal substances in the years 2010-2012 after he won 7 Tour De France titles. This shows that the drug tests that the anti doping agencies around the world are performing are not working and we should stop wasting the outrageous amounts of money used for this process.
So why should we spend millions of dollars trying to chase down drug users when we could put that money to much better use? For example, we could channel those funds back into the medical system that supports players injured during matches. This would ease the pressure on our healthcare system and also ensure players are always looked after and in the best hands possible. Secondly, we could provide greater salaries to players in under-funded sports, such as hockey. This will lead to more participation in the sport and will encourage youth to try and become a professional hockey player.
Finally, aiding smaller countries such as Samoa or Grenada to world-wide events like the Olympics, which will be great for world wide relationships and support. Personally, I think that it would be ludicrous not to legalise performance enhancing drugs in sports. It would make the sport livelier and intriguing to watch plus it would completely eliminate the ‘cheating’ aspect in sports, not to mention the berserk amount of money being saved if we were to legalise performance enhancing drugs in sports.
