Drug Testing in Athletics
The use of enhancing drugs has become a hot button topic in athletics, particularly high school and college where young athletes often feel immense pressure to excel in order to secure a future in college or professional athletics. What supplements should and shouldn’t be allowed? How does the use of these supplements affect the players and the game? These are all questions that have been brought to the forefront of discussion.
How Steroids Changed the Game
Looking back at photos of old sports players and comparing them to today’s players shows drastic, staggering changes in physical appearance. While some of this can be attributed to better knowledge of diet and muscle building workout routines, a great portion of it is due to the use of performance enhancing drugs.
In his book Testosterone Dreams, author John Hoberman charts the use of steroids in American culture. He highlights the rapid success the St. Louis Cardinals experienced in the 1930’s after starting testosterone steroid programs. Hoberman writes: “Within a generation, sports audiences around the world were enjoying record-breaking performances achieved by athletes whose “productive power” was boosted by testosterone-based anabolic steroids (Hoberman, 4).” Because of the performance that these early century athletes gave, today’s athletes are forced to strive to break their records and to go beyond what could have ever been accomplished by them. In fact, the use of performance enhancing drugs has become so common place that Hoberman has even given the phenomenon its own title of “compulsory or obligatory doping” and believes if left unchecked can become a complete subculture in athletics (Hoberman, 4-5).
It all comes down to what is normal and accepted by society. Hoberman makes the very poignant comparison of mood enhancing drugs to performance enhancing steroids. While mood and concentration drugs, such as Zoloft and Ritalin, are readily prescribed to school-aged children, these drugs are considered normal and acceptable to society even though they are changing the chemical makeup of an individual to give them an edge that they would not normally possess. Yet when a school-aged child uses steroids for school athletics this is not considered an acceptable solution to overcoming physical shortcomings (Hoberman, 6-7). The athletes who are stuck in the dilemma of performing better than past athletes, as stated above, have no readily available answer or method to improve. They can’t take steroids because society says it is wrong, yet society then turns and demands world athletic records to be broken.
Athletic Drug Testing Today
In 1995, the Supreme Court effectively closed the book on whether or not mandatory school drug testing for athletics was an invasion of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, the protection against unreasonable search and seizure. In Vernonia vs. Acton, student-athlete James Acton was refused membership on his school’s football team due to his parent supported refusal of the Vernonia School District of Oregon’s random urine analysis policy for athletics. The Supreme Court ruled that because the school was a government institution and the government has a right to protect its ventures, random drug testing was not a violation of student-athletes’ Fourth Amendment rights. Doubling the feeling on that ruling was the fact that Acton was a minor and that risks, like drug use, against a minor should be minimized at all costs, which in this case would be minimized through detection of illegal drug use. Due to this monumental ruling, randomized and non-randomized drug testing has become part of many school’s athletic policies. Until this ruling is overturned, drug testing will continue to occur regularly.
This, however, only covers high school and not college, particularly because the majority of college students are not minors. College student-athletes are required to sign release forms for drug testing and may have to go through drug testing before they are even offered a finalized place on the university’s team. And many college students, acutely aware that not only their future athletic career but also educational career, depend on the good state of random and non-random drug testing have turned to legalized means of enhancing performance.
Today’s Acceptable Supplements
As discussed earlier, increased knowledge of diet and exercise has had a tremendous factor in the advancement of today’s athletes. Many of the legal, normally used supplements on the market today are aimed at increasing muscle mass rapidly, such as creatine, glutamine, and HMB. There are also legal testosterone supplements such as CLA, and many other supplements designed to reduce fatigue, burn fat, and lose water weight.
All of these supplements come with their own bodily risks. Testosterone supplements, when taken regularly, will eventually trigger the body to shut down its natural production of testosterone, leading to health problems for men such as decreased sex drive and impotency. In women, the boost of testosterone can lead to male patterned baldness and deepening of the voice. Stamina boosting drugs can lead to sleep cycle disruption, and protein supplements are exceptionally hard on the kidneys.
Even today’s workout routines can cause serious stress to the body. While body image is most frequently seen as a female problem, more and more young males are feeling the pressure to live up to advertiser’s depictions of the perfect male body. When an individual lifts heavy weights they are tearing their muscles. This tearing and then the later re-growth is what leads to the increase of muscle. However, young men who feel the pressure to be well-built may develop a body image disorder and lift too much too often, causing permanent damage to their muscles.
Today’s athletes feel exceptional pressure to perform at the maximum of the human body’s ability and then push farther, damaging their bodies and putting more strain o the future generation of athletes to come. While drug testing may help to prevent some of this societal pressure, it is really a complete shift in society’s perceptions of sports and athletes that needs to be changed to protect future athletes from harm.
