Should We Allow Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Sport? A Rebuttal to the Article by Savulescu and Colleagues

Abstract

Savulescu et al. [1] propose that, since it will never be possible to control drug use in sport, athletes should be allowed to use those performance-enhancing drugs that are “safe”. The authors fail to explain, however, why appropriate doping control has yet to be achieved in world sport. In this rebuttal, it is argued that the widespread doping of elite athletes, as is now common, cannot easily occur without government collusion that is either overt or covert. There is also evidence that a number of international sporting bodies have followed the same principle. Furthermore, since their products are so readily available to elite athletes, those pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the most popular performance-enhancing drugs would appear to be indifferent to the misuse of their products by athletes for nonmedical purposes. The control of drug use in sport has never been achieved, because these three stakeholders who should have acted to eliminate doping in sport appear to have chosen an opposite action without due consideration for their ethical responsibility to protect athletes from the proven dangers of doping. Doping in sport can only ever be defended for exclusively commercial reasons (both legal and criminal) and certainly not on the illusory ethical grounds proposed by Savulescu et al. [1].