Should Performance Enhancing Drugs Be Legalized - Essay Example

Using drugs to cheat in sport is not new. It is just becoming more effective that makes it more attractive to athletes. The International Amateur Athletic Federation estimates that only 10–15% of participating athletes are tested in each major competition which explains many can get away with it (Clayton et al). The incentive also for the winner is just far too attractive to resist. This explains why it is virtually impossible to stop the athletes from taking performance enhancing drugs no matter how harsh the penalties would be.

Also, there are drugs such as erythropoietin (EPO) and growth hormone which are also natural chemicals in the body. As nutrition technology advances, these drugs becomes harder to detect because they are like the natural drugs in the body that even if they are being tested, they will still come out as negative. Performance enhancing drugs only becomes more dangerous when they are banned because it can no longer be regulated. When performance enhancing drugs are banned, athletes and their handlers will likely get them in an unknown black market where they do not know whether such drug is safe or not.

And instead of properly testing them for their safety, potency and proper use, athletes will instead rely on the trial and error of the use of performance enhancing drugs because they have to hide their use so that they will not be caught. This is a very dangerous practice because they do not know what they are doing. And this is the real risk in the use of performance enhancing drugs than the performance enhancing drugs themselves because they run the danger of taking too much, or taking the wrong drugs.

This explains why we often hear athletes who died or suffered from performance enhancing drugs side effects because they do not know what they are doing. If performance enhancing drugs are regulated, the athletes can come out in the open to use the proper avenues for their safety, potency and proper use. Government and sport regulators on the other hand can test the safety and proper use of performance enhancing drugs and can dispense advises on their effects and their proper use. If there are side effects to a particular substance of a performance enhancing drugs, at least the athlete knows what he or she is taking and can prepare for remedial measure just in case something goes wrong in taking the performance enhancing drugs.

This is safer because help can be had when something goes wrong compared to banning them altogether where athletes could not seek help in case of overdose or misuse for fear of being caught and penalized. And this is the danger of keeping it underground. Critiques of performance enhancing drugs argue that they are cheating because they are making themselves better than everyone else. And that it defeat the purpose of the sport because they would not know if the athlete is really that good without performance enhancing drugs and that it does not make sense to reward people who are cheating (Debate.org). This argument however can easily be debunked by the purpose of the sport which is really to be better than competitors.

That instead of depriving the opportunity to be better with the help of drugs, it would be safer to make it available to everybody in a regulated and safe manner and see how far can everybody go. Undue advantage only makes it cheating when not all have the same chances of winning. Banning performance enhan