Performance enhancing drugs in sports has become a controversial issue in the world today, especially when it comes to athletes and people involved in it. These drugs are commonly known as PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) and people who use these drugs to enhance their performance consider it legitimate as it helps in improving their concentration level. Today’s athletes continue to push the boundaries of distinction in performance and physical fitness. PEDs have been a go to source for these athletes, with more refined training methods and technologies.
However from a social and ethical perspective, PEDs possess harmful threats to the consumer and those who compete with them. Athletes do not take these drugs to level the playing field, they do it to gain an unfair advantage among the competitors. Obviously this is unethical and no UTA student will want to see it happen. PEDs are any substance taken in nonpharmacological doses specifically for the purposes of improving sports performance. A substance is considered to be performance enhancing if it benefits sports performance by increasing strength, power, speed, or ergogenic or by altering the body weight/composition.
Furthermore, in a simple sense, the substances that improves performance by causing changes in behavior and performance in the advantage of the person should be considered performance enhancing. PEDs are illegal to use as it degrades the natural working phenomenon of the human body in athletes. Use of steroids can have serious health repercussions. As steroid give an athlete a superhuman like ability in their performance in respective sports, they tend to use it more than the recommended dose. Secondly, the use of PEDs affects the integrity of sport.
Sport is not about simply winning, the cliche “It’s not about whether you win or lose, it’s how you played the game” is absolutely true. Permitting the use of steroids under proper medical supervision would threaten the fairness and integrity of the game. These are the main reason why PEDs are illegal to use. The value of PEDs is great as the use of cretin, androstenedione, and erythropoietin include physical enhancement, bigger body mass and improvement in endurance and strength with less effort. Performance enhancing drugs comes in many forms.
There are PEDs available in pill form or in injections. It increases muscle mass and strength which helps athletes recover quicker from injuries. One main reason to why athletes use PEDs is the increase in oxygen-carrying capacity of RBCs in blood which helps them to gain more stamina during competition. The cons of using performance enhancing drugs include many negative physical side effects. All of the side effects can present a very serious physical medical issues. Males are prone to hair loss, acne, liver cancer and premature closure of the growth center of the long bone in them.
Females are exposed to growth of body, facial hair, irregular menstrual cycle and they are also liable to contract deepening of the voice. Hypertension, anemia, strokes are some common after effects of the performance enhancing drugs. Gaining that little bit of competitiveness can lead to greater increases in performance but may affect an athletes overall health. Performance enhancing drugs are not only restricted to professional players now, as by mimicking them the use of PED is on the rise in high schools. Athletes hear about the pros using the drugs and they see the difference it makes.
They get overwhelmed by the results but what they don’t know or don’t care about are the long term effects. The effects on teenagers are similar to the effects on adults. If a teenager starts out using at this young age and constantly uses, they will never be able to stop because of the addictiveness the drug has on them. The pressure placed on athletes to perform better and the fierce competitive nature of the modern sports’ world, in combination with society’s demand for excellence, has caused athletes to seek alternative means to enhance.
Today’s athlete faces an increasingly difficult choice: to use drugs to enhance performance or to accept what could amount to a competitive handicap. It ignites an unethical point of view that athletes would have an unfair advantage over other athletes. Would the people who were tested positive for PEDs would have the same result without the help of steroids? Have some outstanding athletes missed the cut for Olympic competition and lost out on a dream because they were competing against athletes who had the advantage of taking PEDs? These questions are based on the idea that athletic contests, by their nature, should be fair and square.
Violations of fairness are wrong. Although the Unfairness Objection is popular and plausible on its face, careful reflection will reveal important questions and problems for this argument. What makes a situation or event unfair? That is a giant question, If PEDs were legal and available, and then it would seem that PED users would not have an unfair advantage. But, in reality, even it was legal, it would come with a cost and there is no reason to suppose that all athletes would have the same opportunity to purchase it. Another issue is the testing for steroid.
There are many masking agents that athletes can use to beat the tests. Moreover, in some sports, tests are not performed frequently or randomly and athletes know about the tests well in advance, giving them plenty time to prepare. Some PEDs, such as amphetamines, will only show up if an athlete is tested within approximately one day of ingestion. Advocates of legalization might argue that since we cannot accurately test for PEDs, we should not ban the drugs even if they lead to massive advantages for users. Others would say that we ought to ban PEDs but urge much better and tougher testing procedures.
The future of drug testing can serve to be an effective deterrent if money, research and cooperation contribute together for drug-free athletes. Modern sports competitions place little emphasis on the means when dealing with the end results. This might cause to be a dangerous situation both for the athletes as well as for the integrity of sport. But efforts are being constantly being made to ensure that sports can once again be played with true sportsmanship spirit. It is for countries and participants to help in jointly maintaining the pride of participation and competition.