Sport as a Drug and Drugs in Sport

Abstract

This article seeks, first, to suggest that relations between `drug users' and members of the wider society have many of the features of an `established-outsider' figuration as defined by Elias; second, to examine aspects of the complex interrelationships between sport and the consumption of alcohol. In this regard, reference is made to the long-standing Epicurean/Dionysian and Stoical/Puritanical conceptions of sport and to the consumption of alcohol in leisure-gemeinschaften. Third, the article seeks to examine some aspects of the increasing use of `sport in the community' schemes as a means of combating the use of drugs by young people and, fourth, to look at some of the ways in which participation in sport might itself be considered, in a loose sense, as a kind of `drug'.