Performane-Enhancing Drugs in Athletics

Performane-Enhancing Drugs in Athletics

Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Athletics
Over the past couple of decades, performance-enhancing drugs and steroids have emerged more as a part of mainstream culture. Performance-enhancing drugs have become a controversial problem very quickly and major sports have now started to address this problem. Scientists originally created steroids to treat medical conditions or to recover faster from an injury. Now, athletes use performance-enhancing drugs more than ever before to improve their athletic abilities. Also athletes use steroids because they want to stand out as the best in the sport they participate in. Even non-athletes have begun using steroids because they want to gain more muscle without doing all the work. The use of steroids is cheating. Because of the negative health effects of performance-enhancing drugs, the unfair advantage they give an athlete, and the negative influence they have on others and sports, these drugs should be banned completely from the world of athletics.
Performance-enhancing drugs and steroids have become a major issue in sports. Steroids are man-made chemicals similar to the male hormone testosterone (Skancke 14). Athletes and others abuse performance-enhancing drugs to develop bigger, stronger muscles, improve physical appearance, or enhance sports performance (Leonard 36). The use of performance-enhancing drugs dates back to the first Olympic Games (“Sports and Drugs”). Athletes would gorge themselves with meat, not a normal part of the Greek diet. They also experimented with herbal medications, drank wine potions, used hallucinogens, or ate animal hearts or testicles to enhance their performance. The origin of the word “doping” comes from the Dutch word “doop,” a viscous opium juice, the drug that ancient Greek athletes drank (“Sports and Drugs”). Also, the use of steroids in high schools can date back to 1959 when a Texas physician gave members of a football team Dianabol, an orally taken or injected steroid (Adams 24)....

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