Mario Lofranco continues his essay on ending the stigma surrounding doping in Sports
In the first part of this article series, I refuted the three common arguments for maintaining the prohibition on doping in sport: (1) naturalness; (2) unfair advantage; and (3) the spirit of sport. In this article, I discuss the most common argument in favour of the prohibition against doping – harm – and argue that we should lift the prohibition on drugs that are deemed to be safe. There are three types of arguments stemming from the idea of harm: (1) harm to the athlete who dopes; (2) harm to clean athletes; and (3) harm to society.
(1) Harm to the athlete who dopes
The first argument for harm consists of three premises and a conclusion. P1: The prohibited substance harms its user (e.g., the athlete). P2: Its user must be protected. P3: The user can be protected by prohibiting the substance. C: Therefore, the substance should be banned.
There is a lack of scientifically validated studies that prove that all prohibited drugs cause harm. Hence, P1 cannot be accepted as a general argument against doping, instead, only for doping methods that are proven to cause harm.
The inconsistency of governing bodies like the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to protect athletes’ well-being by banning certain substances speaks to the lack of direction surrounding the protection of users. WADA argues the health of their athletes is their primary motive for prohibiting doping, yet their actions illustrate the opposite when they allow sporting organizations that fall under their purview to be sponsored by products harmful to one’s health. Examples of this hypocritical behaviour are Budweiser sponsoring the 2006 FIFA World Cup and British American Tobacco sponsoring the Silk Cut Rugby League from 1985-2001. If WADA purports to be concerned about drug use impacting athletes’ health, their allowance of sponsors whose products are unhealthy suggests otherwise. This inconsistency in WADA’s advocacy proves the arbitrary nature of decisions they make to prohibit “harmful” drugs in sport but promote them in recreation.
Another example of WADA’s arbitrary decision-making stems from their selection of which drugs to permit and prohibit. Under WADA’s guidelines, caffeine was prohibited because it met at least two of the three criteria for banning a substance – it is a performance enhancer, and it can harm an athlete. Caffeine was only removed from WADA’s list of prohibited Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED) in 2004 because they decided it is safe to allow due to its “natural” mode of delivery within the body, illustrating that public perception of prohibited substances change over time. If we are happy to welcome substances like caffeine back in, why are we so reluctant to allow other safe PEDs, like Erythropoitin (EPO) and Human Growth Hormone (HGH)?
EPO and HGH occur naturally in the body. Using the same logic, we should permit them under WADA’s guidelines because they process in our body in a natural way. Similar to caffeine, both EPO and HGH have the potential to be lethal with abuse and misuse, but these drugs can be safe if they are administered in small doses under physician supervision. Many of these banned drugs are routinely used to treat common illnesses – children are given HGH when below the expected height for their age, which makes WADA’s decision to prohibit them befuddling.
Likewise, governing bodies like WADA continue to ban drugs for athletes to protect their well-being, yet they allow athletes to participate in both brutal training practices and sports. The risks associated with sport are what scholars like Julian Savulescu discuss when he says that “there is no such thing as a risk-free sport, or life…elite sport is itself risky.” Examples of this include: the brain damage occurring from boxing, sumo wrestlers needing to be at an unhealthy weight to compete, or the fact that 20% of cyclists who participate in the Tour de France do not complete the race due to injury. Sport has always been dangerous. To argue that banning PEDs is to protect the athlete is arbitrary since we allow many other risky operations in sports.
Even if we grant P2, P3 fails due to the lack of evidence that prohibiting doping will lead to the protection of athletes. Today the ban is in effect, yet athletes will continue to dope in unsafe ways so long they can gain a chemical advantage. This disdain for the prohibition was evident when 23 athletes were found to have taken banned substances during the Athens Olympics or the fact that Russia was banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics due to their own doping scandal. These numbers only represent the athletes caught, as there are surely many more who skirt the radar. Considering the widespread use of PEDs, we need to look at regulating safe drug use as opposed to their complete prohibition.
(2) Harm to clean athletes
The second argument for harm contends that if PEDs were permitted, then athletes would either be compelled to conform to the pressure of using dangerous drugs, or they would not dope and accept competing at a disadvantage or leave their sport entirely. That view is problematic because we would not argue that an athlete is coerced to follow the same training programs and strict diets proven to yield results. If an athlete trains seven days per week, we would not argue another athlete in the same sport is coerced to also train seven days per week to maintain their level of competitiveness. It is unclear why doping is any more coercive than those same regimens. After all, professional athletes make their living off of sport, so, naturally, they want to be the best and do what it takes to get there.
(3) Harm to society
The third argument from harm has two principal lines of reasoning: (1) the burden on society argument; and (2) the Role Model Argument (RMA).
(1) If we permit doping in sport then it would place a burden on society because we would bear the healthcare costs for the short and long-term effects. No one has a right to burden others with the cost of their risky behaviour unless that behaviour is morally necessary. Doping in sport is not morally necessary, thus people should not dope because of the negative societal effects it may have on others.
This argument against doping in sport is problematic for two reasons. First, the main point of permitting doping is to only permit drugs that are safe. As mentioned, drugs like EPO and HGH are proven to be safe by the current uses on patients by medical practitioners. Thus, if we only allow drugs proven to be safe – drugs with no short or long-term side effects – then society will not have to bear negative costs because athletes will not suffer a direct harm of using PEDs. Second, this argument assumes that society is not already burdened with other parts of sport. For example, Brazil spent USD $11.6 billion on the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and less than 15% of this cost was covered by private investors, meaning the remaining 75% of the funds came from the state and federal budgets. Brazil is still feeling the negative economic effects of such an expenditure. Thus, you can say that the very nature of sport is a burden to society. Should we abolish sport in general? This would be too extreme, and that is why we must opt for the solution that we only permit drugs which are proven to be safe and have no short or long-term side effects.
(2) If we permit doping, we will set a bad example for younger athletes. The premise is that if athletes are not banned from doping, they will inspire people to use drugs in a way that could be harmful to themselves — therefore, athletes should be prohibited from doping.
Whether we should consider athletes as role models is another argument, but even if we grant that assumption, the RMA remains flawed for two reasons. First, there is a lack of empirical evidence supporting that children will be inspired to dope by elite athletes. Surely there is evidence to support children imitating their favourite player’s style, sometimes tragically so, but this is not true for the rest of their habits. For example, how many children bit off someone’s ear when Mike Tyson did the same to Evander Holyfield, or how many kids try to train and eat healthy like their idols? There are many things athletes do that children do not follow. Even if there is substantial evidence to show a causal link between a child taking the same drug as their favourite athlete, the drug the child is using may not be harmful to their health. As mentioned, lifting the ban on doping would mean only safe drugs would be permitted in safe environments (i.e., with a medical practitioner). This means that not all drugs on WADA’s banned list are unsafe, like beta-blockers which are used by musicians to control their stage fright or Ritalin which is used by children who have ADHD. The assumption that all types of doping by athletes could lead to a child harming themselves is flawed.
Second, the RMA fails because the moral claim that an athlete’s behaviour should be banned if it harms people is too demanding. There are many things that we consider appropriate for adults but not for children, such as alcohol, cigarettes, and sex; yet we don’t ban these substances or activities for adults because they would be “bad” for children. It is accepted that athletes are role models for children, but so are parents and no one has proposed we punish parents who smoke or drink in front of their children when the aggregate social harm caused by smoking and drinking far outweighs the total harm that may follow from a child doping. Rather, most people favour adults having access to non-prescribed and unmonitored health-damaging drugs (e.g., alcohol and tobacco) and ban adults from using monitored and prescribed substances that are on the WADA’s banned list – many of which, in safe doses, do not include a health risk. We cannot control the reactions that people may have to the behaviour of others, specifically athletes, and it is too demanding to hold athletes to a moral standard different than the one we hold parents to.
Conclusion
Throughout this article, I have argued that we should remove the ban on drugs in sport so long as the drugs are deemed safe. I have presented and refuted the four common arguments found within the literature for maintaining the prohibition on doping in sport (1) naturalness; (2) unfair advantage; (3) the spirit of sport; and (4) harm. The use of PEDs is not limited to athletes. When we pay to go see an opera, we want to see a talented musician perform at their best. If we find out performers were using beta-blockers to quell their stage fright, society is unlikely to respond the way it does to athletes caught doping. Yet, when it comes to sport, we care deeply about the use of drugs. It is high time to shift the paradigm of PED-use in sport to a more inclusive one.
