drugs

it wouldn't be an olympics if there was not a story or three about drugged up super athletes this year was made all the more spectacular by the banning of russian track and field competitors because of states sponsored doping. (interesting sidebar and a foreshadowing of a coming up future blog – the alt right (or conspiracy theorists) have argued that this is just a reaction to putin not playing the new world order game).

of course it wouldn't be a scandal if the governing body did what it was supposed to do, instead it fobbed the hard decision off on to various sporting federations. hey you get paid the big bucks to pass the big buck.

so drugs in sport! who would have thought it?

there was a time not so very long ago where i was totally anti-drug. those days have gone. it is not that i am now pro-drug, it is more that i am legalise and control drugs, let people use them and make money from the taxes. for social use i can only see benefits – drugs are exciting because they are illegal so kids want to try them: look at me i am so rebellious. that puts them in touch with a group of people who are just like any other business; they want to make money and they want them to buy more and more of their shit (to use old school parlance – like i know what the fuck i am talking about). like ciggies and booze some dabble and drop it, others become life long sensible users and a few become addicts.

making drugs available over the counter means they will quality controlled, they will be price regulated but more importantly the element of criminality will be removed.

more tax, less crime. winner.

solved the social issues of drugs, i shall now move on to drugs in sports. no messing about here.

pretty much all sports have had some sort of issue with drugs – whether it be their stars being caught using recreational drugs or turning into full blown disaster zones because of drug abuse. or there is the issue of performance enhancing drugs.

performance enhancers come in all shapes and sizes all with the express aim of making you better at what you do – whether it be running, riding, driving, jumping, thinking or just posing.

being clean and being a winner is what counts, and most champions are indeed that.

but are they really clean – have they taken painkillers/ blockers to allow them to compete? if they have then it can just be as easily argued that they have been 'enhanced'.

the thing is that drugs are becoming much more sophisticated and it is taking longer to find 'drug cheats', they are still testing samples from the beijing and london olympics and finding some were doped.

why bother?

the reasons why you would want to keep drugs out of sport are as follows: it isn't a level playing field and so doping is cheating. that it gives the impression that these athletes are different from the rest of us and we can't aspire to attain their levels of competitiveness. that by doping they are poor role models and, worse, poor walking billboards for advertising the wears of various high profile companies.

the main reason to take drugs? to win.

given that i come back to my question of why bother worrying.

look most of us are not going to become top line sportsmen, so it hardly matters to me if the upper echelons of sport juice themselves up with lawks knows what in order to get that extra yard out of themselves. ironically if doping was made legal then perhaps more people would be able to compete at higher levels.

if everyone had the choice to use drugs then the playing field is levelled and so cheating is no longer an issue. if you wanted to compete clean you could – usain bolt, among many others, has shown that to be the best you do not need to be injecting or pill popping. in fact you could have two classes of athlete clean and enhanced. the only one that would need checking would be the clean athlete.

if social drug use is made legal then the question of sportsmen being doped up is no longer a worry for them being role models, if we keep choosing to use them as such.

probably the key driver that keeps athletes on the straight and narrow is their endorsements – you put in all those hours of training, you might as well do all you can to make sure you keep the money you get from your many sponsors. you know when a tiger woods has fallen from grace – not by the lack of wins but by how many companies choose to release him from his contract to promote their brand.

now i would wager that the majority of fans just want to see the fastest, longest, highest, furthest. fans want to see the best, and they want to see the best win.

i would legalise drugs in sport, that sportsmen would have to declare if they were clean or enhanced and you would test only those who were clean. then see what market forces wanted – do the fans turn up to see serena sweep all before her because of talent and hard work or do they turn to the latest wunderkind who has taken a jamboree bag of pills to aid their rise to the top? do the fans protest the heavyweight championship because the winner is a reject from rocky 4?

once the fans have shown they accept their heroes are using drugs you will see the once very moral brands return to paying big money to their sports stars again.

sure there will be a few doped up guys who win, but the fans will know who they are and whether or not they want to support them. then we will see just what the public want – do they want clean or do they want to see the best being the best that they can possibly be. where the fans go, that is where the money goes and where the money goes the sports stars go.

if the public go for doped super athletes then it won't be long before drugs are made legal.

hypocrisy is beaten.

everyone happy.

sport's problem solved.

a societal problem solved.