Honestly PEDs should be legal and regulated in athletics, if not for performance, then at least for recovery. It's completely arbitrary what's legal and not anyway and a good training program and the best coaches also function as a PED.
Make it uniform and regulate it and maybe you keep everyone safe. Or not. I don't really care, I build scripts for a living. /shrug
The argument I've heard against this is about safety.
Firstly, you don't want athletes needing to push the limits of safe pharmaceutical use just to win. This forces all competitive athletes to dose the maximum amount allowed. Moreover, though perhaps less of an issue, it forces those who seek an illegitimate advantage to push even further than they need to now.
Secondly, this 'sets a bad example'. Not in the moral sense, but in a pragmatic sense. Regulated doping in competition encourages enthusiastic amateurs to also start doping. Not only does it seem wrong to require aspiring amateurs to take medical steps, there is the added issue of lack of guidance. Amateurs have less of a support team around them, thus making mistakes or uneducated use more likely.
In the end, you rule against doping not to keep the sport fair, but to keep the sport safe for aspiring amateurs and professionals. In turn, this keeps the sport alive by having a steady influx.
There is a fairness issue regarding 'pay to win' becoming a more effective strategy whilst, at the same time, also increasing the financial barrier to entry.
The problem is that sports competition is zero-sum: it doesn't really matter whether the fastest run takes 4 minutes or 3:59, but it does matter whether you're a second faster than your competitor. This quickly generates a "race to the bottom" where everyone has to pay absolute costs for relative advantages.
This is less desirable outcome than is ideal, which is why there's room for making everyone better off through enforcement of norms against PEDs. It's a question of what everyone must do in order to be competitive.
That said, there should be a conversation about whether the cure is worse than the disease. If PEDs are safe enough, the costs of enforcement and allowing the cheaters who make it through the screens to win will outweigh the benefits of having the bar for competition lowered.
Well, "legal" and "allowed in the sport" are two different concepts.
Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland. It's just the US that criminalizes them, and probably has influenced the decision to ban them outright.
Regulation is another thing. I'd actually say they are regulated, in that the current rule is "don't take them". And even enforcing that relatively simple rule - just detect them, is actually a hard problem we can't solve very well, given the amount of athletes that lost medals over the last couple of olympics.
In the end, PED regulation is just another set of rules added to each sport. These are professional athletes, and most manage to not run into any problems understanding and following the rules. Adding some kind of "permitted level of use" is theoretically possible, but I suspect you'll just end up spending a lot more money trying to detect how much anyone is using at a particular period of time, etc. etc. Add stupid political pressure from the US federal government, and I'd imagine any kind of "lenient system" would just be far, far more expensive to execute.
I have recently suffered a traumatic brain injury (tbi) - not unlike what may be common in football, hockey and other contact sports - and not exactly pleased with the medical response that there is no real treatment other than rest, I began doing some research and came across an open letter from a Harvard PhD to the NFL commissioner regarding cannabis and concussions, CTE and TBI. They focus on the CBD heavy variety and suggest it acts as a neuroprotector. Then a little more research I came across an Israeli study regarding TBI improvements in rats using cannabis, I even thought I found an article saying the Israeli military uses cannabis for treatment of soldiers and enemy combatants with TBI but I can't seem to find it now.
I'm not so sure about peds for competition or recovery, but if cannabis is considered a ped by various sports commissions and can be beneficial to brain injury that is a damn shame.
There was a periodic survey of Olympic athletes asking "would you take a PED that guaranteed a gold medal and shortened your lifespan to five years?", more than half said yes.
My only issue is that athletics start at a young age for most. For some sports, people routinely go pro in their teenage years (tennis, baseball, etc.). We would have parents PEDing up their kids just to get the college scholarships or drafted out of high school. Feels like that would do more harm than good.
The problem there is that you are then encouraging people to use substances which are potentially detrimental to their long term health. In fact, they'd have to use them to be competitive.
Of course, it's perfectly valid to say that we're already at that point, but I don't know that sanctioning their use is the right thing to do for the governing bodies. I don't know what the answer is, but I agree completely that they should be illegal in the eyes of the law.
> Make it uniform and regulate it and maybe you keep everyone safe. Or not. I don't really care, I build scripts for a living. /shrug
Well, if you don't care, why do you bother to profess an opinion? There are plenty who do care about the well-being of athletes.
I am skeptical, however, that doping will ever get under control unless the pressure behind the doping relents. The rewards in elite sports are perhaps too great. By the time athletes reach their prime mentally, the body is no longer at its peak, and they're desperately trying to compensate to finally reap the rewards of a career of brutal training.
How would you regulate it? If you decide some things are dangerous and forbid their usage then you are back to testing athletes because they might use it anyway if it is still effective.
> Honestly PEDs should be legal and regulated in athletics
Well, it is regulated. What is not regulated is that for example steroids permanently modify the amount of myonuclei so that a steroid user will have better long term recovery (rebuilding from reduced muscle state) for decades after usage. Or take EPO: the effect of using EPO is the same as using a compression chamber and has the same dangers (arguably, using EPO is safer than subjecting your body to a outdated compression chamber sourced from the landfill), yet one is allowed and one is forbidden. Then there's steroid usage after injuries (why do teams have a dedicated physician? so he can give people steroids if they stub their little toe).
You can either forbid (on paper) or completely deregulate; "some" regulation will not change very much vs. prohibition.
"Regulating it" means creating new rules. Which would, once again be broken if athletes thought it would help their performance. And you'd end up at square 1, except everybody who was previously clean was now forced to take all the drugs the new rules permitted.
And there's nothing really arbitrary about the rules, or at least no more arbitrary than almost any other rule you can find. Just because you can argue about the exact requirements to become a lawyer in Iowa doesn't mean that my hamster is as good a lawyer as the top graduate of Harvard Law.
I wish there were a sport where anything goes performance enhancement wise. Full-on hulks just roiding out and showing PEAK human performance. Is there anything like this in the world?
The problem is that the worst coaches exist too. The reality is that you're going to have kids with even worse chronic long term problems after they play through.
Doping does work. There are reasons athletes do it and take enormous risk with their careers and health.
I remember a long article in Outside magazine where the journalist doped with EPO and HGH to compete in amateur cycling at a level he found to be surprising: https://www.outsideonline.com/1924306/drug-test
Using the word "cheating" is too simplistic of a dismissal for doping, I think.
Once I did a lot of weight lifting. I gained weight from 65 kg to 75 kg but then hit a wall. Whatever I did I couldn't get above 75. There were several guys like me but all of a sudden some gained weight again. Not just a little, but 10 kg in 8 weeks. I asked them what's going on and they all told me they got steroids from Poland. The progress was amazing. Since then I am pretty sure that all top athletes take something. The advantage is just too much.
Fascinating article. I've always wondered about the proportionality of increase with drugs like this, and he makes it sound quite a bit more dramatic than I imagined.
I pretty frequently place in the top 5% in amateur mid-distance running, like 10k or half marathon. Sounds like if I was on the juice I could easily be in the running for podium finishes.
It IS a big risk career-wise, but from reading things people in-the-know say, it seems that if you have a knowledgeable person administering the PEDs, it's a relatively low-risk endeavor health-wise.
I'd highly recommend the Netflix documentary Icarus. The filmmaker starts out trying to more or less replicate the doping routine of Lance Armstrong while competing in amateur cycling.
I don't want to give anything away, but the documentary takes an incredible turn once the filmmaker meets Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov — who ran the Russian anti-doping lab prior to Russia's ban from the Rio Olympics.
The problem with performance enhancing drugs isn't their use per se, it's the fact that competition at a high level more or less forces you to use any and all means at your disposal to win, and this forces would-be winners to consume large, unhealthy, long-term unstable and harmful amounts of drugs.
People who manage sports associations are comfortable with people sacrificing time and fortune for their passion, but they are not (in general) comfortable with creating an environment in which people must sacrifice their health and well-being to compete.
PEDs in some form should probably be (and in fact are, in most states) legal for personal use, but I believe that anything with the potential to cause long term bodily harm when abused should be banned in organized competition by the organizers (not some state, unless it's a publicly funded athletic organization). I further believe that unless demonstrated to be safe, most medications should be assumed to be damaging, within reason. There should be a long, slow, tedious path to approval.
That's the world view that, to me, does the best job of creating a healthy environment for athletic competition.
As a sports outsider I see the problem with doping to be moral and societal.
Moral: we agree on some rules, compete, and the guy who won may have broken a trivial rule to get an advantage. How is this acceptable?
Societal: I'm not a fan of spectator sports in general, but... when people become rich and famous and powerful by cheating, that probably strenghtens the view in many people that winning at the expense of others and ignoring our own earlier declarations is more important than cooperation, fair conduct, honesty etc. Not a world I would like to live in.
I think sports have always been war games of sorts in that they carve out boundaries of in groups and out groups. People overwhelming support the team that they identify with (geographically determined for the most part) regardless if they win a lot or lose a lot because it is not enough to win, you need to win with identity. To unleash "win at any means" is far too close to war itself which subverts the intention of the game to replace war.
The stigma steroids have gotten because of MLB and a few other notable famous athletes is really unfortunate. Low doses of testosterone in men shows great health benefits especially for men >40. HGH and other growth hormones like IGF-1 have also shown great general health benefits. Steroids are schedule 2 drugs on the same level as opioids so just about everyone who is taking them (besides wealthy people who can afford to go to anti-aging clinic where you can be prescribed for this) is doing so low key which makes awareness and education very difficult.
That stigma started with the parents of teenagers, who committed suicide while taking steroids, appealing to their congressman. Prior to reading The Waxman Report, I had no idea what the fuss was about.
The generic concept of performance enhancing drugs has always concerned me. I've seen nootropics crop up on hacker news occasionally, and I have this terrible feeling that someday the only way to remain competitive in whatever you do will be to take performance drugs regardless of the consequences (unknown or not), be they mental, physical, or otherwise...
When I was doing research on SARMs, GW501516 often came up.
It basically works in the opposite way that Meldonium does, increasing cellular metabolic preference for lipids as opposed to glucose. I wonder which metabolic pathway is optimal for weight-loss; probably a combination of the two.
I hiked up a modest mountain to watch the eclipse and found myself winded after about 1 hour of light (~10-15 degree incline) and my feet were like trudging through molasses for the remaining 4 hours of climb (45+-ish degree incline)... I'm not in terrible shape (I can do 11 pull ups, and maybe about an hour of medium cardio without discomfort at sea level). I wonder if meldonium could be used to combat altitude sickness.
I don't know the regimen of tests players go through in professional sports, but I've thought for many years that players who depend more on mental sharpness than physical performance (For example a QB in the NFL) are doping to improve mental performance. It always seems the investigations and testing that I hear about or read about in the news revolve around (a) illegal drugs, and (b) drugs that improve physical performance. I've never heard of a case of testing for drugs that improve mental performance.
Would be interesting to know from an evolutionary standpoint why the heart preferentially burns fatty acids, when burning glucose is supposed to be better. The heart muscles have one of the highest rates of use. Maybe there are long-term side effects associated with the glucose pathway?
There isn't any proof that this drug provides any benefit to athletes. It is easy to think all PEDs work when your only knowledge is EPO and steroids. Other stuff... much less testing and the performance boost might be neglible.
When I first heard about this drug (from the Sharapova incident) and looked it up, it sounded like a miracle drug for Rock Climbers, which I am. I have family in Russia as well, where you can buy it over the counter, but I haven't had the courage to try it out yet.
This article really makes me want to give it a shot, just for curiosity sake. My main limit on wall climbs isn't technique or strength, it's getting pumped out. Training endurance has been incredibly hard for me. Even when I was younger and played soccer, I was getting winded way before anyone else, even though I was just as active. I've always felt like I have some kind of oxygen weakness, compared to other people.
> I was getting winded way before anyone else, even though I was just as active. I've always felt like I have some kind of oxygen weakness, compared to other people.
This should go without saying, but you should really get that seriously checked out before trying doping. You might have a heart problem that isn't a problem until it is the last problem you'll ever have, or it might be nothing.
Please describe your feelings on athletes wearing contact lenses. How about athletes who have ever had a surgery? What about athletes who are, at the time of competition, using non-prescription antihistamines? How about pseudoephedrine?
1. Human performance only - no drugs, no implants, no performance boosts.
2. Unlimited league. Take all the drugs you want, when we have them, install new muscles, cybernetic implants, whatever. Go wild.
This way, the real purists, who want to push the envelope of human capability get to do so without having to compete with dopers.
AND
High dollar/prestige sports will fund new and interesting areas of biomedical research. It will be like indy car racing for human bodies.
This doesn't work like that. You will have dopers in first (clean) league, because there will be all the fame, prestige and money. Unlimited league would be marginal and no one would promote drug users.
[+] [-] mlloyd|8 years ago|reply
Make it uniform and regulate it and maybe you keep everyone safe. Or not. I don't really care, I build scripts for a living. /shrug
[+] [-] rocqua|8 years ago|reply
Secondly, this 'sets a bad example'. Not in the moral sense, but in a pragmatic sense. Regulated doping in competition encourages enthusiastic amateurs to also start doping. Not only does it seem wrong to require aspiring amateurs to take medical steps, there is the added issue of lack of guidance. Amateurs have less of a support team around them, thus making mistakes or uneducated use more likely.
In the end, you rule against doping not to keep the sport fair, but to keep the sport safe for aspiring amateurs and professionals. In turn, this keeps the sport alive by having a steady influx.
There is a fairness issue regarding 'pay to win' becoming a more effective strategy whilst, at the same time, also increasing the financial barrier to entry.
[+] [-] ThrustVectoring|8 years ago|reply
This is less desirable outcome than is ideal, which is why there's room for making everyone better off through enforcement of norms against PEDs. It's a question of what everyone must do in order to be competitive.
That said, there should be a conversation about whether the cure is worse than the disease. If PEDs are safe enough, the costs of enforcement and allowing the cheaters who make it through the screens to win will outweigh the benefits of having the bar for competition lowered.
[+] [-] mr_tristan|8 years ago|reply
Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland. It's just the US that criminalizes them, and probably has influenced the decision to ban them outright.
Regulation is another thing. I'd actually say they are regulated, in that the current rule is "don't take them". And even enforcing that relatively simple rule - just detect them, is actually a hard problem we can't solve very well, given the amount of athletes that lost medals over the last couple of olympics.
In the end, PED regulation is just another set of rules added to each sport. These are professional athletes, and most manage to not run into any problems understanding and following the rules. Adding some kind of "permitted level of use" is theoretically possible, but I suspect you'll just end up spending a lot more money trying to detect how much anyone is using at a particular period of time, etc. etc. Add stupid political pressure from the US federal government, and I'd imagine any kind of "lenient system" would just be far, far more expensive to execute.
[+] [-] will_brown|8 years ago|reply
I'm not so sure about peds for competition or recovery, but if cannabis is considered a ped by various sports commissions and can be beneficial to brain injury that is a damn shame.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3gqe/the-nfl-sh...
http://www.timesofisrael.com/cannabis-could-treat-traumatic-...
[+] [-] stevenwoo|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman%27s_dilemma
The update in that wikipedia link point to changing attitudes in more recent years.
[+] [-] callmeed|8 years ago|reply
My only issue is that athletics start at a young age for most. For some sports, people routinely go pro in their teenage years (tennis, baseball, etc.). We would have parents PEDing up their kids just to get the college scholarships or drafted out of high school. Feels like that would do more harm than good.
[+] [-] EpicEng|8 years ago|reply
Of course, it's perfectly valid to say that we're already at that point, but I don't know that sanctioning their use is the right thing to do for the governing bodies. I don't know what the answer is, but I agree completely that they should be illegal in the eyes of the law.
[+] [-] crispyambulance|8 years ago|reply
I am skeptical, however, that doping will ever get under control unless the pressure behind the doping relents. The rewards in elite sports are perhaps too great. By the time athletes reach their prime mentally, the body is no longer at its peak, and they're desperately trying to compensate to finally reap the rewards of a career of brutal training.
[+] [-] cc81|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pmf_|8 years ago|reply
Well, it is regulated. What is not regulated is that for example steroids permanently modify the amount of myonuclei so that a steroid user will have better long term recovery (rebuilding from reduced muscle state) for decades after usage. Or take EPO: the effect of using EPO is the same as using a compression chamber and has the same dangers (arguably, using EPO is safer than subjecting your body to a outdated compression chamber sourced from the landfill), yet one is allowed and one is forbidden. Then there's steroid usage after injuries (why do teams have a dedicated physician? so he can give people steroids if they stub their little toe).
You can either forbid (on paper) or completely deregulate; "some" regulation will not change very much vs. prohibition.
[+] [-] matt4077|8 years ago|reply
And there's nothing really arbitrary about the rules, or at least no more arbitrary than almost any other rule you can find. Just because you can argue about the exact requirements to become a lawyer in Iowa doesn't mean that my hamster is as good a lawyer as the top graduate of Harvard Law.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispyambulance|8 years ago|reply
I remember a long article in Outside magazine where the journalist doped with EPO and HGH to compete in amateur cycling at a level he found to be surprising: https://www.outsideonline.com/1924306/drug-test
Using the word "cheating" is too simplistic of a dismissal for doping, I think.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
Once I did a lot of weight lifting. I gained weight from 65 kg to 75 kg but then hit a wall. Whatever I did I couldn't get above 75. There were several guys like me but all of a sudden some gained weight again. Not just a little, but 10 kg in 8 weeks. I asked them what's going on and they all told me they got steroids from Poland. The progress was amazing. Since then I am pretty sure that all top athletes take something. The advantage is just too much.
[+] [-] sushisource|8 years ago|reply
I pretty frequently place in the top 5% in amateur mid-distance running, like 10k or half marathon. Sounds like if I was on the juice I could easily be in the running for podium finishes.
Not that I would, but, geez.
[+] [-] vlasev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austinl|8 years ago|reply
I don't want to give anything away, but the documentary takes an incredible turn once the filmmaker meets Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov — who ran the Russian anti-doping lab prior to Russia's ban from the Rio Olympics.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/ic...
[+] [-] jknoepfler|8 years ago|reply
People who manage sports associations are comfortable with people sacrificing time and fortune for their passion, but they are not (in general) comfortable with creating an environment in which people must sacrifice their health and well-being to compete.
PEDs in some form should probably be (and in fact are, in most states) legal for personal use, but I believe that anything with the potential to cause long term bodily harm when abused should be banned in organized competition by the organizers (not some state, unless it's a publicly funded athletic organization). I further believe that unless demonstrated to be safe, most medications should be assumed to be damaging, within reason. There should be a long, slow, tedious path to approval.
That's the world view that, to me, does the best job of creating a healthy environment for athletic competition.
[+] [-] jakubp|8 years ago|reply
Moral: we agree on some rules, compete, and the guy who won may have broken a trivial rule to get an advantage. How is this acceptable?
Societal: I'm not a fan of spectator sports in general, but... when people become rich and famous and powerful by cheating, that probably strenghtens the view in many people that winning at the expense of others and ignoring our own earlier declarations is more important than cooperation, fair conduct, honesty etc. Not a world I would like to live in.
[+] [-] dlwdlw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burger_moon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialist|8 years ago|reply
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-steroids-era
https://www.amazon.com/Waxman-Report-Congress-Really-Works/d...
[+] [-] Teknoman117|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trentmb|8 years ago|reply
Nicotine gum is pretty much the only reason I can stay focused at work.
[+] [-] Applejinx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterRock|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 0x8BADF00D|8 years ago|reply
When I was doing research on SARMs, GW501516 often came up. It basically works in the opposite way that Meldonium does, increasing cellular metabolic preference for lipids as opposed to glucose. I wonder which metabolic pathway is optimal for weight-loss; probably a combination of the two.
[+] [-] dnautics|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atomical|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perpetualcrayon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legulere|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atomical|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legohead|8 years ago|reply
This article really makes me want to give it a shot, just for curiosity sake. My main limit on wall climbs isn't technique or strength, it's getting pumped out. Training endurance has been incredibly hard for me. Even when I was younger and played soccer, I was getting winded way before anyone else, even though I was just as active. I've always felt like I have some kind of oxygen weakness, compared to other people.
[+] [-] kristofferR|8 years ago|reply
This should go without saying, but you should really get that seriously checked out before trying doping. You might have a heart problem that isn't a problem until it is the last problem you'll ever have, or it might be nothing.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jlebrech|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlebrech|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackmott|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aetherson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielharrison|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matz1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greekyogurt21|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] otabdeveloper2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daotoad|8 years ago|reply
1. Human performance only - no drugs, no implants, no performance boosts. 2. Unlimited league. Take all the drugs you want, when we have them, install new muscles, cybernetic implants, whatever. Go wild.
This way, the real purists, who want to push the envelope of human capability get to do so without having to compete with dopers.
AND
High dollar/prestige sports will fund new and interesting areas of biomedical research. It will be like indy car racing for human bodies.
[+] [-] lossolo|8 years ago|reply