We could split sports up: Clean sports and Steroid Sports

That’s hilarious. I guess that you don’t know any “natural” bodybuilders.

Today the US army pumps the troops full of caffeine laden energy drinks.

There’s an obvious tradeoff. Once these people become dependant on performance enhancing chemicals, they run the risk of crashing and withdrawal on the battlefield.

If you’re addicted to amphetamines, and you run out days before extraction, you’re going to perform a lot worse than non addicted troops when you go into withdrawal and feel like you’re dying.

I wouldn’t want to defend the safety of trying to tamper with the endocrine system too dramatically; but I have some bad news about the purity of your precious bodily fluids…

“For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people,are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making newtubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such anabundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.”

Less correct, you mean?

Steroids are nasty, dangerous drugs that fuck you up in a variety of ways. It’s entirely reasonable to characterize them as “dirty”.

It seems to me that the line between “legitimate” uses of such drugs and “cheating” has been so blurred that we need a new definition of “cheating”.

Same goes with athlete’s who abuse drugs. They know they shouldn’t, but do anyway because of compitition and the fact that if they don’t someone else will.

Also, could we come up with something less…value-laden… than the term ‘clean’? 

We could split sports up: Clean sports and Steroid Sports – then people can decide what they prefer. O

Are you sure it wasn’t Lance Armstrong?

It’s indisputable that we now have drugs that can make a non-trivial improvement of human abilities… what if the beneficiary is a neurosurgeon trying to save the life of your child?

Certainly the two primary considerations of sports testing are valid – basic fairness, and long-term negative side effects.

But we are past the stage of history where completely unmodified humans can compete equally with humans who use all the technology available. And what a brave new world it is.