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Using Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED's) os illegal. Taking Performance Enhancing Drugs has started to become a fad. Pro-athletes have been encouraging young athletes to take them. Taking these drugs makes people extremely aggressive. It is a form of cheating and people think it is necessary because it would make the game fair. In conclusion, taking Performance Enhancing Drugs is a trend that is illegal.

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However, others argue that the decision regarding whether to use PEDs should be left up to the individual athletes. Norman Fost, a pediatrics professor at the University of Wisconsin, contends that elite athletes do not achieve success based on natural talent alone.

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A runner on steroids, which his massively defined muscles can be seen.

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A silhouette of a baseball player using a needle with steroids injecting into him as a bat.

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A male athlete who has obviously been taking steroids to get defined muscles.

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There are more deaths are related to alcohol rather than steroids. Not all athletes choose to take steroids, and they won't ruin you so steroids shouldn't be illegal. Athletes who use steroids are stripped from their championship/medal/title. The doctors at Northeastern University injected steroids into adolescent hamsters and found the animals turned very aggressive. Steroids give an unfair advantage, but other athletes are bigger and stronger. Overall, sports are unfair and people take steroids to try and make it better so therefore steroids should be legal.

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Professional Athletes Should Be Allowed to Use Steroids

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Athletes are coerced into using steroids. "That would mean there's the use of force or a threat of deprivation. Steroids are an offer to be better off than you are, just as signing up with a professional team is an opportunity to be better off than you are.

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Russian athletes were caught using steroids before the Rio Olympics, this video is eye opening to see the riskes of using stimulants.

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The Disturbing Truth About Doping in Sports

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Performance Enhancing Drugs ruin human bodies, mental states, it can cause sudden death, and it ruins reputations and careers.

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Why Performance-Enhancing Drugs Should Stay Illegal

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Athletes may abuse the use of marijuana for "healing injuries". There is no way to completely monitor how much athletes may intake. Drug testing will obviously show they are taking something, but it might not show how much. The only way to know how much athletes take all the time is to monitor them all the time, which no one wants to do. Most prescription opioids do not lead to addiction, but marijuana could lead to addiction. In conclusion, marijuana should not be allowed in sports because it can develop many life threatening symptoms.

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Using drugs while playing pro sports will usually get a player warned, fined, or suspended. But some people think it's time to let athletes use marijuana to treat pain from the injuries pro sports can inflict.

Nate Jackson, who played for the Denver Broncos from 2003 to 2008, says NFL players need marijuana for medical reasons, to help players cope with the frequent injuries-or as he puts it, "to offset the brutality of the game." In a New York Times opinion piece last year, Jackson argued that marijuana is a better option than handing injured players bottles of prescription opioids, strong pain medications that can be highly addictive. NBA player Blake Griffin has also said that pro athletes might benefit from medical marijuana to treat pain, instead of using prescription painkillers.
Is marijuana a good swap for opioids?
Although prescription opioids are often addictive and can cause confusion and sleepiness, most people who use them as prescribed for acute (severe, often short-term) pain don't develop an addiction.

However, a 2009 study commissioned by ESPN (with additional funding from NIDA) found that a lot of NFL players may be misusing opioids during their careers, leading to long-term addiction. Since prescription opioids are chemically similar to heroin, some people who start out abusing prescription opioid pain medications end up using heroin.

On the other hand, some studies have shown that marijuana (or THC, the active ingredient in marijuana) may help with some types of pain, such as chronic (persistent) nerve pain resulting from injury or surgery. But while the risks associated with marijuana addiction are generally not as severe as the possible risks of prescription opioid addiction, marijuana addiction can develop, as can other health problems. Using weed can impair thinking and memory, for example. Also, THC interferes with parts of the brain that control balance and coordination, which is bad news for athletes who need to be quick on their feet during games.

THC can also impair concentration and can make people more likely to take risks. (In fact, for some athletes increased risk-taking may be part of marijuana's appeal. In a 2011 study, researchers (some of them from NIDA) found that some athletes might be using marijuana to forget bad falls, take more risks to improve training, or work through pain.) Not to mention that playing stoned slows people down and makes them less vigilant, which could lead to more athletic injuries. Because of the drug's health risks, the researchers said they supported banning it from sports.
So what are players' options to control injury-related pain?
For now, athletes can use opioid medications for a short period of time and expect them to help with recovery from injuries. Honest conversations between doctors and their athlete-patients can help lower the risk for addiction-and if problems do develop, those conversations can help people get the professional help they need before they spiral down the black hole of addiction.

For those athletes (and regular people, too) who have chronic pain, there is research showing that long-term use of opioid medications can actually make pain worse and can lead to addiction. But this is a hotly debated issue, and very smart people disagree with each other. Clearly, more research is needed. At the moment, it's an individual decision between doctors and their patients on what treatments will work best.

There are also alternative-medicine approaches for pain that some people have found helpful, such as acupuncture, some nutritional supplements, and chiropractic treatment, among others.
Where is research (and medicine) heading?
Marijuana might be of interest to some athletes, but it doesn't have the NFL's seal of approval for players looking to treat their pain. And though some states have made it legal for people to use marijuana for medical reasons, it's important to note that marijuana is still not a medicine approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which approves medicines for the federal government. But NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says the NFL will " follow medicine " and medical experts in the future, in deciding whether to let players use marijuana to treat head injuries.

You may have heard (or read on this blog) about FDA-approved medicines that use some of the chemicals in marijuana, called cannabinoids. These medicines aren't currently approved in the U.S. for treating pain, though. However, NIDA is funding research into potential use of marijuana and cannabinoids for the treatment of pain-so depending on what the science says, this may change in the future. Stay tuned!

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Using drugs while playing pro sports will usually get a player warned, fined, or suspended. But some people think it's time to let athletes use marijuana to treat pain from the injuries pro sports can inflict.

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Steroids have several positive aspects, they can be used for medical purposes. Steroids have been classified into two categories: anabolic steroids and steroid injections. There are three ways steroids can be injected into a human body, stacking, cycling, and pyramiding. Stacking is extremely dangerous as this involves using more than one steroid at a time. Cycling on the other hand involves taking a steroid over a certain period of time, allowing the body to rest and then starting afresh. Pyramiding is a process that combines both cycling as well as stacking. There is no safe way to inject steroids into a body, and they ruin lives and careers.

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Effects of Steroids - Positive and Negative Side Effects

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Steroids are generally referred to as a group of drugs that are used in medical science to treat a large number of medical conditions.

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Athletes are racing to find the next invisible steroid that hasn't been discovered yet, we watch sports to see teams and players compete at their very best naturally steroids are ruining that.

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This cyclist went to a law school and has a very strong point of view. He believes that doping has no place in sports, it goes against the fundamentals of sports. Sports are about enjoying the game whether people win or lose. This society has turned sports into a competition to see who can get the best steroids or who can get the biggest while taking steroids. This has become such a big issue that professional sports leagues have even created their own rules for doping. If someone dopes during their career on a professional team they could potentially ruin their career and possibly their life.

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Ask anyone with a decent knowledge of sports and current events, and they will tell you: doping in sport is a problem. Nearly every week, another high-profile doping story makes its way to the headlines of newspapers around the world. A quick Google News search for "doping" revealed over 7,500 results from the past week alone. The stories ranged from the lesser known 2 Youth Olympic Games Wrestlers who were recently suspended to the more famous 2010 Tour de France winner Alberto Contador's positive test.

Earlier this month, Brent Musburger (an ABC/ESPN sports commentator) told a group of students at University of Montana that steroids work. Musburger blamed "journalism youngsters" who "got too deeply involved in something they didn't know too much about" for the negative image steroids and doping now have. He went on to say that steroids had no place in high school, but "under the proper care and doctor's advice, they could be used at the professional level." (Quotes take from the Missoulian article.)

If you know me (or have been in a class with me), you know how I feel about doping in sports. In fact, anti-doping was one of the reasons I came to law school, and more specifically to Marquette. My view is that doping has no place in sport. The story of how I came to become so staunchly against doping is for another day (and perhaps a different venue), but basically involves my love for the sport of cycling and the systematic doping that plagues that sport. Suffice it to say that I take a firm stance against doping in all sports in all forms.

It probably goes without saying that I could not disagree with Musburger more. Doping, least of all in the form of anabolic steroids, has no place in sports - amateur or professional. I think all anti-doping arguments come down to two basic principles, only one of which Musburger addresses in his blanket approval of steroid use in professional athletes.

First, doping threatens the health of athletes. Musburger argues that with proper medical supervision, steroids can be healthy. While this might be true in some (and I would suggest limited) cases, it would certainly not be true in all cases. The use of steroids can have serious health repercussions, including affected liver, endocrine, and reproductive function, tumors of the liver and kidneys, heart conditions, and psychiatric symptoms. Additionally, the article just linked goes on to mention the increased probability of side effects when 1) steroids are used more than the recommended dose, 2) steroids are used in conjunction with other performance enhancing substances, and 3) counterfeit or tainted steroids are used.

Legalizing steroid use would not solve these problems. The side effects listed in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (a part of the National Institute of Health) article are not restricted to improper use of steroids. I will not detail out the side effects of not only steroids, but also the use of hGH and EPO (often used in cycling), the NCBI does a nice job of listing those and providing citations to studies. Furthermore, the drive to win will always encourage athletes to take "just one more." Sure, proper medical supervision would ensure that an athlete receives the proper dose from that doctor, but when that athlete fails to win the next race, game, or match, he or she is more likely to increase the dose or combine other methods of doping.

Second, and unaddressed by Musburger, doping affects the integrity of sport. Sport is not about simply winning. The saying "It's not about whether you win or lose, it's how you played the game," although cliché, is absolutely correct. The Olympic Movement identifies the Olympic spirit - mutual understanding, spirit of friendship, solidarity, and fair play - as fundamental to sport. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was founded on the principle that integrity of sport is fundamental to the spirit of sport, and that integrity is threatened by doping. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) division on anti-doping believes that "doping jeopardizes the moral and ethical basis of sport and the health of those involved in it." The National Football League itself created its own steroid policy because steroid use threatens "the fairness and integrity of athletic competition" and "sends the wrong message to young people who may be tempted to use them." Sports are about competition on equal footing, with respect for the opponent, and with respect for the rules of the game.

Permitting the use of steroids under proper medical supervision would threaten the fairness and integrity of the game. First, athletes who choose not to use steroids are at an unfair advantage - most will be unable to compete at the same level as athletes who are using steroids. Second, the integrity of the game is compromised because it is no longer about which athlete has the best skills or talent, it's instead about which athlete has the best steroid cocktail or the money to buy the best steroids. Thus, steroid use is contrary to the spirit of sport - fairness, respect, and solidarity. The concept of mutual respect between competitors is thwarted when one (or both) athletes would rather use steroids to improve his or her performance than compete based on individual strength, skill, or talent.

However, if health and integrity concerns aren't enough to convince you, consider this final point. Law students, and indeed lawyers, are fond of the slippery slope argument. I think it finds a comfortable place in this debate. It's a slippery slope between allowing steroid use with proper medical supervision and eliminating anti-doping regulations. Where is the line to be drawn? Will it now be illegal to use steroids only if taken without proper medical supervision? How can proper medical supervision be proven? How does an athlete prove that the steroids in his or her body were as a result of proper medical supervision and not other means? What about athletes who use more than the recommended dose? What about other forms of doping (hGh or EPO)? Are those next to be permitted under proper medical supervision? It's difficult to see how regulating the use of steroids in sport is workable.

The only way to preserve integrity in sport and protect the health of athletes is through a serious anti-doping approach. Anti-doping efforts are most successful when the "law" (anti-doping policy) sets forth clear, bright-line rules about when and what substances are prohibited. Although a long way from perfect, WADA has created the most comprehensive anti-doping program in the world (indeed the only anti-doping program most of the world outside of the US models and implements). American professional sports leagues should be looking at ways to model the WADA code in its own anti-doping policies (like the United States Anti-Doping Agency is doing), not seeking ways to excuse steroid use or compromise anti-doping efforts. Steroids have no place in sports.

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Ask anyone with a decent knowledge of sports and current events, and they will tell you: doping in sport is a problem. Nearly every week, another high-profile doping story makes its way to the headlines of newspapers around the world. A quick Google News search for "doping" revealed over 7,500 results from the past week alone.

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A slogan to reinforce the fact that athletes shouldn't use steroids because they are illegal.

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A female athlete who is taking steroids and the muscles are not natural.

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Professional athletes do choose to stay clean. They are at an inherent disadvantage to the people who don't choose to stay clean. There will always be a place in sports where it will be natural and people want to be their best. Sports coaches may suspend players for getting arrested but not for using the actual steroids themselves. Using steroids has become a natural assumption made by coaches. Steroids can be extremely dangerous for your body, mindset, and career so therefore steroids should be banned in any sport.

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Performance-Enhancing Drugs Should Not Be Legalized

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Performance-Enhancing Drugs, edited by Roman Espejo, Greenhaven Press, 2015. Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, http%3A%2F%2Flink.galegroup.com%2Fapps%2Fdoc%2FEJ3010934208%2FOVIC%3Fu%3Dpl2683%26sid%3DOVIC%26xid%3D1468f097. Accessed 6 Mar. 2019. Originally published as "Don't Take Easy Way Out; PEDs Are Bad for People, Including Athletes," Sports Illustrated, 15 July 2010.