Why should performance enhancing drugs be banned?

Skateboarding is more dangerous than taking steroids. The injuries are immense. People end up in the hospital for months. A vert ramp is 3 times as dangerous than half the stuff mentioned.

And what about javelins? Someone getting a spear through their entire torso, not paying attention.

I just find it either disengenuous, or ignorance, to say that bodliy danger, or health, is the best argument for banning steroids. On a ranking list of occurances in sports, of what goes on in Olympic sports at least, steroids would rank way lower on a danger scale than wrestling, ski jumping, down hill mogule at what? 78 mph? Did you ever see the agony of defeat on Wild World of Sports?

How about running a marathon in excess heat in Rio? Is that going to be safer than steroids? what about the training involved in fencing? Or how about the needed ring work in boxing to prepare for the match? Getting your chest pummelled with blows, broken knuckles, hit in the throat, internal organs bruised up.

i just don't agree that theres a genuine concern over health when we have all this hazzard going on in the Olympics, and we are going to say that the real problem with steroids is danger to the body?

I'm not saying they should definitely be legal. But this danger to the health angle just isn't cutting it.

OppositeMan

You are exactly the person that PED bans are designed to protect. Because you, unsurprisingly, have a really poor sense of the risks and relative risks of various activities.

You look at taking steroids and imagine that it could never be more dangerous than ski jumping. So it must be OK, right?

Here are some numbers from the paper "Steroid Use and Long-Term Health Risks in Former Athletes", published in the journal Sports Medicine in 2002.

"The mortality of 62 male power lifters placed 1st to 5th in the weight series 82.5 to 125kg in Finnish championships during 1977 to 1982 was compared with the mortality of population controls. The use of anabolic steroids among top-level power lifters during these years was considered to have been widespread as power lifting did not come within doping controls until 1984. The mortality during the 12-year follow-up was 12.9% for the power lifters compared with 3.1% in the control population. By 1993, 8 of 62 power lifters and 34 of 1094 population controls had died, thus the risk of death among the power lifters was 4.6 times higher (95% confidence interval 2.04 to 10.45; p = 0.0002)."

So if you take steroids you have about a 12.9% chance of dying in the 12 years that follow.

By comparison: "Nordic ski jumping fatalities in the United States: a 50-year summary" was published in 1988 so doesn't even account for the last 25 years of technological advances.

"Six jumping fatalities have occurred in the United States during the past 50 years. The fatality rate for nordic ski jumping, estimated to be roughly 12 fatalities/100,000 participants annually, appears to be within the range of fatality rates for other "risky" outdoor sports. Cervical fractures appear to be the most frequent fatal ski-jumping injury."

STEROIDS ARE EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. POINT. DONE. END OF DISCUSSION. WAY MORE DANGEROUS THAN PARTICIPATING IN OTHER "RISKY" SPORTS.

peds and the cultural of ped-taking will trickle down to HS and grade school. Sports obsessed kids will ask for peds and parents will indulge with the hope it will lead to a scholarship. Kids wanting to compete clean will be laughed at. Sports in general will be even uglier than it is now.

Yet you, in an ironic and idiotic twist, generalize ski jumping as the same as all other risky sports, one in the same. I guess ski jumping is the only risky sport.

It would also mean the end of women's sports as we know them.

The winners would simply be the girls who are willing to relinquish their femininity and be one of the ones who comes as close as possible to turning themselves into men by using testosterone.

I would imagine for a lot of girls, this would be a massive turn-off when making a decision whether to become an athlete or not.

It also opens the door for a whole manner of abuse, particularly in countries with a history of large scale doping systems (and perhaps in those without.)

potato man wrote:

Yet you, in an ironic and idiotic twist, generalize ski jumping as the same as all other risky sports, one in the same. I guess ski jumping is the only risky sport.

Oh my god, the idiocy. Just make a list of every sport that you want to know about. I'll find numbers for all of them.

I'm curious to know which sports you think have mortality rates above 12.9%. Really. Go ahead and prove how stupid you are.

dumb wrote:

There will always be people who like to smoke, eat junk food and drink alcohol. That is their choice.

Some are better responders to training too. Some have better natural genetics. Being a great responder to some drug would just be one gift among other gifts. Nothing wrong with that.

Banning PEDs gives rich athletes like Armstrong an advantage over other athletes who do not have the same resources.

Sorry, but the analogy to eating junk food or drinking alcohol to PED use in athletic competition doesn't make sense whatsoever.

I want to see who's the fastest sprinter or distance runner based on genetics and training, not additional chemical use.

Legalizing PED use will not prevent athletes from taking additional, non-safe amounts to get an additional edge, so the cheating will still be a part of sports. Nothing accomplished by 'monitoring' PED use by physicians. Cheaters/chemical responders will continue to dominate the podium places.

I understand this is not a black and white issue, but no one here is making a good argument for legalizing PED use in athletics.

categorically wrote:

potato man wrote:

Yet you, in an ironic and idiotic twist, generalize ski jumping as the same as all other risky sports, one in the same. I guess ski jumping is the only risky sport.

Oh my god, the idiocy. Just make a list of every sport that you want to know about. I'll find numbers for all of them.

I'm curious to know which sports you think have mortality rates above 12.9%. Really. Go ahead and prove how stupid you are.

OK, smart guy. You want risky? I'll give you risky.

What are the numbers for:

Acapulco cliff diving

Norwegian table tennis

Blade badminton

Chesapeake Chess

to name just a few. I'm waiting.

Removing the PED ban doesn't mean that drug use would be legal.

It just means they would stop testing for it.

So it would encourage athletes to do something illegal to compete since the risk of being caught through an athletics federation would go away.

You would still have the shadier athletes gaining an advantage.

But you would gain a new group of runners that had only the fear of getting caught cheating by the sports federations stopping them before.

They will be going to the internet to get their drugs, not a doctor.

I guess it doesn't bother the anti steroiders that around a quarter mile away from track,is an arena where judo guys are throwing each other head over heels, or a quarter mile beyond is another where boxers are hitting each other in the head at 2 min intervals. If it did, you would be more worried about this. You're lying. You don't care about health. Apologize for misleading every poster.kj

Death also isn't the criteria for health. Boxers end up with punch drunk slurring talking, and broken eye sockets. Hockey players get concussions, missing teeth. See what happens when you screw up on the luge.

Medical charts around 4 pages long listing fractures, long term effects like debilitationo by arhtritic joints. Or if you like we can look at the health risks of American football where the career expentency is 4 and a half yrs, mostly done by career ending life extending injury.

yuiop wrote:

And the problem with legalizing PEDs, is the assumption that it "levels the playing field" when in reality some are simply better responders than others. The 100m champion would be the best PED responder not the fastest man on Earth.

this x 1000

So that T&F doesn't become what bodybuilding is, i.e. chemical warfare...so athletes don't have to risk their health to be competitive, so kids don't become tempted to use, etc.

marijuologist wrote:

...so athletes don't have to risk their health to be competitive, etc.

So I take it you're for banning boxing, rodeo, skydiving, and drag racing

Why is it so hard for you to understand that most people who want to compete in track and field and watch track and field want the sport clean?

Take your drugs and your drug takers elsewhere. You won't be missed.

Start your own drug league. See who joins you.

Why do you have to piss in the water where people want to swim clean?

categorically wrote:

potato man wrote:

Yet you, in an ironic and idiotic twist, generalize ski jumping as the same as all other risky sports, one in the same. I guess ski jumping is the only risky sport.

Oh my god, the idiocy. Just make a list of every sport that you want to know about. I'll find numbers for all of them.

I'm curious to know which sports you think have mortality rates above 12.9%. Really. Go ahead and prove how stupid you are.

8 of 62 powerlifters died???

OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO POWER LIFTING IS SO DEADLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I'm going to start a petition to ban boxing, flying trapeze,rodeo, wrestling, bull fighting, and MMA.

I expect every health concerned person in here to sign it.

lost in Boston wrote:

Why is it so hard for you to understand that most people who want to compete in track and field and watch track and field want the sport clean?

Take your drugs and your drug takers elsewhere. You won't be missed.

Start your own drug league. See who joins you.

Why do you have to piss in the water where people want to swim clean?

How is the definition of "dirty" reached?

OppositeMan wrote:

I'm going to start a petition to ban boxing, flying trapeze,rodeo, wrestling, bull fighting, and MMA.

I expect every health concerned person in here to sign it.

This is stupid. Boxers, bull riders, etc. understand there are risks involved in their sport - ridiculous to compare to PED use. Not much risk running 10,000m around a track. A distance guy doesn't want to risk his long-term health and chooses to compete clean, but misses out on Olympic teams, podium finishes, endorsements, and prize money for running clean (without drugs he's one of the best in the world) - sound fair to you?

Gonna Have to Call U Out wrote:

OK, smart guy. You want risky? I'll give you risky.

What are the numbers for:

Acapulco cliff diving

Norwegian table tennis

Blade badminton

Chesapeake Chess

to name just a few. I'm waiting.

OK, I'm going to try, just for fun.

Cliff diving - 8 fatalities in the US national parks from 2003-04. This activity would only be more dangerous than steroids if only 64 people jumped in those two years.

The World High Diving Federation has a pretty rigorous set of rules for competition, training and general safety.

Table tennis - This one is actually too good. "Physical activity of moderate intensity in leisure time and the risk of all cause mortality"

Table tennis has a MET (multiple of resting metabolic rate) value of 5. Researchers established a "moderate intensity (lifestyle) index" so they could measure the benefits or risks of table tennis (and other activities). If subjects engaged in these activities for 1 hour, 3 days per week they were actually healthier than people who didn't. The research comes from Germany. I have to assume this holds true for Norwegians.

I don't know if you mean badminton played with swords (very risky) or just regular badminton. Badminton was also studied in the previous research.

Chess - There are no specific studies on the mortality of playing chess, unfortunately. Any grad students looking for a thesis topic?!

Increasing activity - even to play board games - helped obese children lose weight and avoid risks of sedentary behavior.

Effortful mental games, including chess, helped ward off dementia and Alzheimer's in the elderly.