CNN's Opinion: It's time to allow doping in sport

[CaféAuLait]

Opinion: It's time to allow doping in sport

Were we to treat athletes as mature adults capable of making informed decisions based on scientific information, we could permit the use of performance enhancing substances, monitor the results and make the whole process transparent.

Instead we continue to demonize those found guilty of doping violations, willing ourselves into ignorance.

Ellis Cashmore says the fight against doping in sport is misguided, and that athletes should be allowed to use drugs.

Athletes take unknown substances, procured from unknown sources and with uncertain results. Permitting the use of doping would rescue sport from this clandestine state, creating an environment that would be not only safer, but more congruent with the reality of professional sport in the 21st century.

Opinion: It's time to allow doping in sport - CNN.com


Should we allow doping in Sport? Or should one rest on their own merits? Should those who refuse to dope in essence be penalized for not wanting to win because of drugs but because of sheer effort?

 

[Grandma]

The athletes should be able to perform on their own merits.

Besides that there are two major problems with doping: The athletes would all be some kind of bulked-up superhumans instead of regular competitors, and a lot of the doping drugs have dreadful side effects. Steroids make men violent.

Too much emphasis is put on sports. There are former athletes dying young because their sport pushed them too hard. For what? The purity of the sport? No - it was for money, profits for the athlete's sponsors or team owners. Too many sports now have morphed into rigged entertainment.

If ever a bubble needed to burst...

 

[nitroz]

No doping in sports.

Sports is about achievement through training, hard effort, and giving it your all.
Not artificially giving yourself an advantage.

 

[blastoff]

Only if we think we need more athletes who are dopes.

 

[KissMy]

Most pro sports athletes are already doping. It needs to be stopped.

Lance Armstrong got metals, endorsement deals, riches & cancer from doping. Then received enormous amounts of sympathy for the cancer he self inflicted. Praise was lavished on him when he overcame cancer (by stopping the dope). He is such a fraud along with all the other dopers out there.

 

[Mad Scientist]

I agree, cheating should be institutionalized.

 

[Katzndogz]

If we're going to legalize drugs, they should be legal in sports also. Then the contest will not be over who is the superior sportsman, but which drugs are the most beneficial.

It's part of our degrading culture, get used to it.

 

[Saigon]

I certainly take the point of the OP - but you have to ask yourself what this stuff does to the bodies of the thousands of young people who take it.

I can't condone people being poisoned, even if they want to do it themselves.

 

[whitehall]

When the democrat party gained the majority in both houses of congress half way into Bush's 2nd term the first item on their agenda wasn't the economy, it was ....steroid use in Baseball. Democrats had a ball (pardon the pun) with McCarthy like hearings (are you now or have you ever been a steroid user) and they spent millions on the indictment and trial of a single Hall of Fame pitcher. Meanwhile Barney Frank told us that Fannie was solvent and the rest is history.