Discourses on Drug Use: The Social Construction of a Steroid Scandal

Abstract

At the 1988 Olympic games, a urine test on Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson left him bereft of his gold medal and nullified his record-breaking time in the 100-meter event. Immediate media reactions to this affair, shaping the popular discourse surrounding it, were distorted by the ideological constructs of the Olympic games philosophy. A national inquiry into the use of performance-enhancing substances in sports focused unyielding attention to details of the reality of Canada's athletes who had used drugs. This initiated a conceptual shift into a more familiar discourse, the demonic perspective on illicit drug use. This is a notoriously unproductive framework for policy analysis. Consequently, potentially instructive parallels among drugs on the street, drugs in medicine and drugs in sports were obscured.

Reality is socially defined. But the definitions are always embodied, that is, concrete individuals and groups of individuals serve as definers of reality. To understand the state of the socially constructed universe at any given time, or its change over time, one must understand the social organization that permits the definers to do their defining (Berger and Luckmann 1967:134).