Essay On Performance Enhancing Drugs In Sports

Morality is the distinction between what is right and what is wrong. In the world of sports there is no place for immorality that would damage the fairness of the competition. Cheating through ways such as the use of performance enhancing drugs can harm the integrity of the game. Since the 1960’s athletes have been using drugs to enhance their abilities. In the past fifteen years, the number of known athletes using these performance enhancing drugs has increased considerably. Two of the top athletes in their respective games, Lance Armstrong and Maria Sharapova, have revealed that during their career they each used performance enhancing drugs. This brings to question their morals and the successful careers they and many other have
Common types of these drugs are steroids, stimulants, hormones, and supplements. Such drugs are used to increase an athlete’s strength, endurance, and ability. By increasing these factors, it allows athletes to recover quicker, train harder, and improve their stamina. The long term effects of some performance enhancing drugs is that they allow athletes to have a longer career because it is helping protect their bodies. For all of these reasons, performance enhancing drugs are illegal in the world of sports to keep the game fair. The first act against the use of drugs in sports was in 1976 when the International Olympic Committee banned the use of steroids (Cable News Network [CNN], 2016). Congress became involved in the issue by passing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1988 which made “possession and distribution of nonprescription anabolic steroids for non-medical purposes a crime” (Cable News Network [CNN], 2016). In 1999, the World Anti-Doping Agency was established and a year later, in 2000, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency was created (Cable News Network [CNN], 2016). Between the establishment of these two agencies and current day, the amount of athletes caught using performance enhancing drugs has increased