The use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport is commonly referred to by the term "doping", particularly by those organizations that regulate competitions. The use of performance enhancing drugs is mostly done to improve athletic performance. This is why many sports ban the use of performance enhancing drugs. Another similar use of medical technology is called blood doping, either by blood transfusion or use of the hormone erythropoietin (EPO). The use of drugs to enhance performance is considered unethical by most international sports organizations and especially the International Olympic Committee, although ethicists have argued that it is little different from the use of new materials in the construction of suits and sporting equipment, which similarly aid performance and can give competitors an unfair advantage over others. The reasons for the ban are mainly the alleged health threat of performance-enhancing drugs, the equality of opportunity for athletes, and the exemplary effect of "clean" ("doping-free") sports for the public.
This entry concerns the use of performance-enhancing drugs by humans. The use of such drugs is also common in horse racing and other equestrian sports, and in greyhound racing.
There are many suggestions as to the origin of the word "doping". One is that it is derived from "dop", an alcoholic drink used as a stimulant in ceremonial dances in 18th century Southern Africa.[1] Another suggestion is that the word comes from the Dutch word "doop" (a thick dipping sauce) that entered American slang to describe how robbers stupefied victims by mixing tobacco with the seeds of Datura stramonium,[2] known as jimsonweed, which contains a number of tropane alkaloids, causing sedation, hallucinations and confusion.[3] By 1889, "dope" was used in connection with the preparation of a thick viscous preparation of opium for smoking, and during the 1890s this extended to any stupefying narcotic drug. In 1900, dope was also defined as "a preparation of drugs designed to influence a racehorse's performance".[4]
Texts going back to antiquity suggest that men have always tried to work harder or at least suffer less as they were doing so. When the fittest of a nation were selected as athletes or combatants, they were fed diets and given treatments considered beneficial. For instance, Scandinavian mythology says Berserkers could drink a mixture called "butotens", perhaps prepared from the Amanita muscaria mushroom, to increase their physical power a dozen times at the risk of insanity.[5] In more recent times, the German missionary and doctor Albert Schweitzer wrote of Gabon in the early 19th century: "The people of the country can, having eaten certain leaves or roots, toil [pagayer] vigorously all day without feeling hungry, thirsty or tired and all the time showing a happiness and gaiety."[6]
A participant in an endurance walking race in Britain, Abraham Wood, said in 1807 that he had used laudanum, or opium, to keep him awake for 24 hours while competing against Robert Barclay Allardyce.[7] By April 1877, walking races had stretched to 500 miles and the following year, also at the Agricultural Hall in Islington, London, to 520 miles. The Illustrated London News chided:
The event proved popular, however, with 20,000 spectators attending each day.[9] Encouraged by this, promoters developed the idea and soon held similar races for cyclists.
The fascination with six-day bicycle races spread across the Atlantic and the same appeal to base instincts brought in the crowds in America as well. And the more spectators paid at the gate, the higher the prizes could be and the greater was the incentive of riders to stay awake—or be kept awake—to ride the greatest distance. Their exhaustion was countered by soigneurs (the French word for "carers"), helpers akin to seconds in boxing. Among the treatments they supplied was nitroglycerine, a drug used to stimulate the heart after cardiac attacks and which was credited with improving riders' breathing.[10] Riders suffered hallucinations from the exhaustion and perhaps the drugs. The American champion Major Taylor refused to continue the New York race, saying: "I cannot go on with safety, for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand."[11]
Public reaction turned against such trials, whether individual races or in teams of two. One report chided:
The father of anabolic steroids in the United States was John Ziegler (1917–2000), a physician for the U.S. weightlifting team in the mid-twentieth century. Ziegler learned from his Russian days that the Soviet weightlifting team's success was due to their use of performance-enhancing drugs. Deciding that U.S. athletes needed chemical assistance to remain competitive, Ziegler worked with the CIBA Pharmaceutical Company to develop an oral anabolic steroid. This resulted in the creation of methandrostenolone, which appeared on the market in 1960. During the Olympics that year, the Danish cyclist Knut Jensen collapsed and died while competing in the 100-kilometer (62-mile) race. An autopsy later revealed the presence of amphetamines and a drug called nicotinyl tartrade in his system.
The American specialist in doping, Max M. Novich, wrote: "Trainers of the old school who supplied treatments which had cocaine as their base declared with assurance that a rider tired by a six-day race would get his second breath after absorbing these mixtures." [13] John Hoberman, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, said six-day races were "de facto experiments investigating the physiology of stress as well as the substances that might alleviate exhaustion." [14]
These "de facto experiments investigating the physiology of stress as well as the substances that might alleviate exhaustion" were not unknown outside cycling.
Thomas Hicks, an American born in England on January 7, 1875, won the Olympic marathon in 1904. He crossed the line behind a fellow American, Fred Lorz, whose concept of marathon-running extended to riding half the way in a car thereby disqualifying him. However, Hicks was also aided by outside help. His trainer, Charles Lucas, pulled out a hypodermic and came to his aid as his runner began to struggle.
The use of strychnine, far from being banned, was thought necessary to survive demanding races, says the sports historian Alain Lunzenfichter.[16] The historian of sports doping, Dr Jean-Pierre de Mondenard, said:
Hicks was, in the phrase of the time, "between life and death" but recovered, collected his gold medal a few days later, and lived for almost 60 more years, although he never again took part in athletics.[17]
In 1924 the journalist Albert Londres followed the Tour de France for the French newspaper, Le Petit Parisien. At Coutances he heard that the previous year's winner, Henri Pélissier, his brother Francis and a third rider, Maurice Ville, had resigned from the competition after an argument with the organiser, Henri Desgrange. Henri explained the problem—whether or not he had the right to take off a jersey—and went on to talk of drugs, reported in Londres' race diary, in which he invented the phrase Les Forçats de la Route (The Convicts of the Road):
Henri spoke of being as white as shrouds once the dirt of the day had been washed off, then of their bodies being drained by diarrhea, before continuing:
Francis Pélissier said much later: "Londres was a famous reporter but he didn't know about cycling. We kidded him a bit with our cocaine and our pills. Even so, the Tour de France in 1924 was no picnic.[7][19]
The acceptance of drug-taking in the Tour de France was so complete by 1930, when the race changed to national teams that were to be paid for by the organisers, that the rule book distributed to riders by the organiser, Henri Desgrange, reminded them that drugs were not among items with which they would be provided.[20]
The use of Pot Belge by road cyclists in continental Europe exemplifies a cross-over between recreational and performance-enhancing abuse of drugs by sportsman.
Benzedrine is a trade name for amphetamine. The Council of Europe says it first appeared in sport at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.[21] It was produced in 1887 and the derivative, Benzedrine, was isolated in the U.S. in 1934. Its perceived effects gave it the street name "speed". British troops used 72 million amphetamine tablets in the Second World War[7] and the RAF got through so many that "Methedrine won the Battle of Britain" according to one report.[22] The problem was that amphetamine leads to a lack of judgement and a willingness to take risks, which in sport could lead to better performances but in fighters and bombers led to more crash landings than the RAF could tolerate. The drug was withdrawn but large stocks remained on the black market. Amphetamine was also used legally as an aid to slimming.
Everton have long been one of the top clubs in the English association football league. The club were champions of the 1962–63 season. And it was done, according to a national newspaper investigation, with the help of Benzedrine. Word spread after Everton's win that the drug had been involved. The newspaper investigated, cited where the reporter believed it had come from, and quoted the goalkeeper, Albert Dunlop, as saying:
The club agreed that drugs had been used but that they "could not possibly have had any harmful effect." Dunlop, however, said he had become an addict.[23]
Benzedrine and its sister drugs were irresistible in other sports. In November 1942, the Italian cyclist Fausto Coppi took "seven packets of amphetamine" to beat the world hour record on the track.[24] In 1960, the Danish rider Knud Enemark Jensen collapsed during the 100 km team time trial at the Olympic Games in Rome and died later in hospital. The autopsy showed he had taken amphetamine and another drug, Ronicol, which dilates the blood vessels. The chairman of the Dutch cycling federation, Piet van Dijk, said of Rome that "dope - whole cartloads -[were] used in such royal quantities." [25]
The British professional Jock Andrews used to joke: "You need never go off-course chasing the peloton in a big race - just follow the trail of empty syringes and dope wrappers." [26]
The Dutch cycling team manager Kees Pellenaars told of a rider in his care:
Anabolic steroids (AAS) were first isolated, identified and synthesized in the 1930s, and are now used therapeutically in medicine to stimulate bone growth and appetite, induce male puberty, and treat chronic wasting conditions, such as cancer and AIDS. Anabolic steroids also produce increases in muscle mass and physical strength, and are consequently used in sport and bodybuilding to enhance strength or physique. Known side effects include harmful changes in cholesterol levels (increased Low density lipoprotein and decreased High density lipoprotein), acne, high blood pressure, liver damage. Some of these effects can be mitigated by taking supplemental drugs.[28]
AAS user in sports began in October 1954, John Ziegler, a doctor who treated American athletes, went to Vienna with the American weightlifting team. There he met a Russian physicist who, over "a few drinks", repeatedly asked "What are you giving your boys?" When Ziegler returned the question, the Russian said that his own athletes were being given testosterone.
Returning to America, Ziegler tried weak doses of testosterone on himself, on the American trainer Bob Hoffman and on two lifters, Jim Park and Yaz Kuzahara. All gained more weight and strength than any training programme would produce but there were side-effects.[29] Ziegler sought a drug without after-effects and hit on an anabolic steroid, methandrostenolone, (Dianabol, DBOL), made in the US in 1958 by Ciba.[30][31]
The results were impressive—so impressive that lifters began taking ever more. Steroids spread to other sports where bulk mattered. Paul Lowe, a former running back with the San Diego Chargers American football team, told a California legislative committee on drug abuse in 1970: "We had to take them [steroids] at lunchtime. He [an official] would put them on a little saucer and prescribed them for us to take them and if not he would suggest there might be a fine."
Olympic statistics show the weight of shot putters grew 14 per cent between 1956 and 1972, whereas steeplechasers grew 7.6 per cent. The gold medallist pentathlete Mary Peters said: "A medical research team in the United States attempted to set up extensive research into the effects of steroids on weightlifters and throwers, only to discover that there were so few who weren't taking them that they couldn't establish any worthwhile comparisons."[32]
In 1984, Jay Silvester, a former four-time Olympian and 1972 silver medalist in the discus who was then with the physical education department of Brigham Young University in the U.S., questioned competitors at that year's Olympics. The range of steroid use he found ranged from 10 mg a day to 100 mg.
| Question | Yes | No | Other |
|---|---|---|---|
| Were you influenced by a professional athlete to take Performance enhancing drugs? | 61% | 39% | 0% |
| Have you ever taken anabolic steroids? | 68 | 32 | 0 |
| Ethically, do you approve of anabolic steroids in athletics? | 48 | 25 | 27 |
| If a test could positively identify steroid users, would you favour banishment of the drug in sport? | 48 | 35 | 17 |
| Are you aware of any specific reason why athletes who have not attained full maturity should avoid anabolic steroid usage? | 42 | 48 | 10 |
| If you were a coach, would you commend anabolic steroid usage to (mature) athletes in your event? | 45 | 35 | 20 |
| Do you feel anabolic steroids have positively affected the performance of athletes in your event? | 65 | 16 | 19 |
| Do you feel that steroids have negatively affected the performance of athletes in your event? | 6 | 61 | 33 |
| Do you feel that steroids enable a person to gain strength faster than otherwise possible? | 84 | 3 | 13 |
| Do you believe that steroids enable a person to gain cardio-respiratory endurance more quickly than otherwise possible? | 13 | 42 | 45 |
| Do you believe that steroids enable a person to gain greater cardio-respiratory endurance than otherwise possible? | 6 | 45 | 49 |
| Have you ever gained localised muscular endurance faster when taking anabolic steroids? | 48 | 42 | 10 |
| Have you gained greater local muscular endurance faster when taking anabolic steroids? | 32 | 22 | 46 |
| Do steroids enhance mental attitude? Do you feel more in control of your life? Do you feel you will perform better in your event? | 68 | 10 | 22 |
| Has steroid usage appeared to contribute to injury problems? | 26 | 32 | 42 |
| Do Athletes who use Performance enhancing drugs lose popularity? | 74 | 19 | 7 |
| Do steroids increase body weight? | 55 | 16 | 29 |
| Are steroids difficult to obtain? | 22 | 61 | 17 |
Several successful athletes and professional bodybuilders have admitted long-term methandrostenolone use before the drug was banned, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sergio Oliva.[33][34] Dianabol is no longer produced but similar drugs are made elsewhere.
The use of anabolic steroids is now banned by all major sporting bodies, including the ATP, WTA, ITF, International Olympic Committee, FIFA, UEFA, all major professional golf tours, the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the European Athletic Association, WWE, the NFL and the UCI. However drug testing can be wildly inconsistent and, in some instances, has gone unenforced.
A famous case of illicit AAS use in a competition was Canadian Ben Johnson's victory in the 100 m at the 1988 Summer Olympics. He subsequently failed the drug test when stanozolol was found in his urine. He later admitted to using the steroid as well as Dianabol, Testosterone Cypionate, Furazabol, and human growth hormone amongst other things. Johnson was therefore stripped of his gold medal as well as recognition of what had been a world-record performance. Carl Lewis was then promoted one place to take the Olympic gold title. Lewis had also run under the current world record time and was therefore recognized as the new record holder, however, in 2003, Dr. Wade Exum, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) director of drug control administration from 1991 to 2000, gave copies of documents to Sports Illustrated which revealed that some 100 American athletes who failed drug tests and should have been prevented from competing in the Olympics were nevertheless cleared to compete. Among those athletes was Carl Lewis. Lewis then broke his silence on allegations that he was the beneficiary of a drugs cover-up, admitting he had tested positive for banned substances but claiming he was just one of "hundreds" of American athletes who were allowed to escape bans, concealed by the USOC. Lewis has now acknowledged that he failed three tests during the 1988 US Olympic trials, which under international rules at the time should have prevented him from competing in the Seoul games two months later.[35]
Former athletes and officials came out against the USOC cover-up. "For so many years I lived it. I knew this was going on, but there's absolutely nothing you can do as an athlete. You have to believe governing bodies are doing what they are supposed to do. And it is obvious they did not", said former American sprinter and 1984 Olympic champion, Evelyn Ashford.[36]
In 1977, one of East Germany's best sprinters, Renate Neufeld, fled to the West with the Bulgarian she later married. A year later she said that she had been told to take drugs supplied by coaches while training to represent East Germany in the 1980 Olympic Games.
She brought with her to the West grey tablets and green powder she said had been given to her, to members of her club, and to other athletes. The West German doping analyst Manfred Donike reportedly identified them as anabolic steroids. She said she stayed quiet for a year for the sake of her family. But when her father then lost his job and her sister was expelled from her handball club, she decided to tell her story.[37]
East Germany closed itself to the sporting world in May 1965.[7] In 1977 the shot-putter Ilona Slupianek, who weighed 93 kg, tested positive for anabolic steroids at the European Cup meeting in Helsinki and thereafter athletes were tested before they left the country. At the same time, the Kreischa testing laboratory near Dresden passed into government control, which was reputed to make around 12,000 tests a year on East German athletes but without any being penalised.[7]
The International Amateur Athletics Federation suspended Slupianek for 12 months, a penalty that ended two days before the European championships in Prague. In the reverse of what the IAAF hoped, sending her home to East Germany meant she was free to train unchecked with anabolic steroids, if she wanted to, and then compete for another gold medal. Which indeed she won.
After that, almost nothing emerged from the East German sports schools and laboratories. A rare exception was the visit by the sports writer and former athlete, Doug Gilbert of the Edmonton Sun, who said:
Other reports came from the occasional athlete who fled to the West. There were 15 between 1976 and 1979. One, the ski-jumper Hans Georg Aschenbach, said: "Long-distance skiers start having injections to their knees from the age 14 because of their intensive training."[7] He said: "For every Olympic champion, there at least 350 invalids. There are gymnasts among the girls who have to wear corsets from the age of 18 because their spine and their ligaments have become so worn... There are young people so worn out by the intensive training that they come out of it mentally blank [lessivés - washed out], which is even more painful than a deformed spine."[40]
After German reunification, on 26 August 1993 the records were opened and the evidence was there that the Stasi, the state secret police, supervised systematic doping of East German athletes from 1971 until reunification in 1990. Doping existed in other countries, says the expert Jean-Pierre de Mondenard, both communist and capitalist, but the difference with East Germany was that it was a state policy.[41]
The Sportvereinigung Dynamo (English:Sport Club Dynamo)[42] was especially singled out as a center for doping in the former East Germany.[43] Many former club officials and some athletes found themselves charged after the dissolution of the country. A special page on the internet was created by doping victims trying to gain justice and compensation, listing people involved in doping in the GDR.[44]
State-endorsed doping began with the Cold War when every eastern bloc gold was an ideological victory. From 1974, Manfred Ewald, the head of the GDR's sports federation, imposed blanket doping. At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the country of 17 million collected nine gold medals. Four years later the total was 20 and in 1976 it doubled again to 40.[45] Ewald was quoted as having told coaches, "They're still so young and don't have to know everything." He was given a 22-month suspended sentence, to the outrage of his victims.[46]
Often, doping was carried out without the knowledge of the athletes, some of them as young as ten years of age. It is estimated that around 10,000 former athletes bear the physical and mental scars of years of drug abuse,[47] one of them is Rica Reinisch, a triple Olympic champion and world record-setter at the Moscow Games in 1980, has since suffered numerous miscarriages and recurring ovarian cysts.[47]
Two former Dynamo Berlin club doctors, Dieter Binus, chief of the national women's team from 1976 to 80, and Bernd Pansold, in charge of the sports medicine center in East-Berlin, were committed for trial for allegedly supplying 19 teenagers with illegal substances.[48] Binus was sentenced in August,[49] Pansold in December 1998 after both being found guilty of administering hormones to underage female athletes from 1975 to 1984.[50]
Virtually no East German athlete ever failed an official drugs test, though Stasi files show that many did, indeed, produce positive tests at Kreischa, the Saxon laboratory (German:Zentrales Dopingkontroll-Labor des Sportmedizinischen Dienstes) that was at the time approved by the International Olympic Committee,[51] now called the Institute of Doping Analysis and Sports Biochemistry (IDAS).[52]
In 2005, fifteen years after the end of the GDR, the manufacturer of the drugs in former East Germany, Jenapharm, still finds itself involved in numerous lawsuits from doping victims, being sued by almost 200 former athletes.[53]
Former Sport Club Dynamo athletes who publicly admitted to doping, accusing their coaches:[54]
Former Sport Club Dynamo athletes disqualified for doping:
Based on the admission by Pollack, the United States Olympic Committee asked for the redistribution of gold medals won in the 1976 Summer Olympics.[56] Despite court rulings in Germany that substantiate claims of systematic doping by some East German swimmers, the IOC executive board announced that it has no intention of revising the Olympic record books. In rejecting the American petition on behalf of its women's medley relay team in Montreal and a similar petition from the British Olympic Association on behalf of Sharron Davies, the IOC made it clear that it wanted to discourage any such appeals in the future.[57]
Currently, tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) and modafinil are causing controversy throughout the sporting world, with many high profile cases attracting major press coverage as prominent United States athletes have tested positive for these doping substances. Some athletes who were found to have used modafinil protested as the drug was not on the prohibited list at the time of their offence; however, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) maintains it is a substance related to those already banned, so the decisions stand. Modafinil was added to the list of prohibited substances on 3 August 2004, ten days before the start of the 2004 Summer Olympics.
In 2009, nearly 1 in 10 retired NFL players polled in a confidential survey said they had used now-banned anabolic steroids while still playing. 16.3 percent of offensive linemen admitted using steroids, as did 14.8 percent of defensive linemen.[58]
The NFL banned substances policy has been acclaimed by some[59] and criticized by others,[60] but the policy is the longest running in American professional sports, beginning in 1987.[59] The current policy of the NFL suspends players without pay who test positive for banned substances as it has since 1989: four games for the first offense (a quarter of the regular season), eight games for a second offense (half of the regular season), and 12 months for a third offense.[61] The suspended games may be either regular season games or playoff games.[61]
While recently MLB and the NHL decided to permanently ban athletes for a third offense, they have long been resistant to such measures, and random testing is in its infancy.[62][63]
Since the NFL started random, year-round tests and suspending players for banned substances, many more players have been found to be in violation of the policy. By April 2005, 111 NFL players had tested positive for banned substances, and of those 111, the NFL suspended 54.[60]
A new rule is in the works due to Shawne Merriman. Starting the 2007 season, the new rule would prohibit any player testing positive for banned substances from being able to play in the Pro Bowl that year.[64]
Unlike individual sports such as bicycling, weight-lifting, and track and field, Football (soccer) is not widely associated with performance enhancing drugs. Like most high-profile team sports, football suffers more from an association with recreational drugs, the case of Diego Maradona and cocaine in 1991 being the best known of those.
Football has however been criticised for not sanctioning players implicated in performance enhancing drug scandals. Most recently, Operation Puerto implicated approximately 50 cyclists and 150 sportspersons of other sporting codes, including several "high profile football players". While the cyclists were named and pursued by the governing bodies of cycling, none of the football players were named or punished for their involvement in the doping ring.
In 1998 the entire Festina team were excluded from the Tour de France following the discovery of a team car containing large amounts of various performance-enhancing drugs. The team director later admitted that some of the cyclists were routinely given banned substances. Six other teams pulled out in protest including Dutch team TVM who left the tour still being questioned by the police. The Festina scandal overshadowed cyclist Marco Pantani's tour win, but he himself later failed a test. The infamous "pot belge" or "Belgian mix" has a decades-long history in pro cycling, among both riders and support staff. More recently David Millar, the 2003 World-Time Trial Champion, admitted using EPO, and was stripped of his title and suspended for two years. Still later, Roberto Heras was stripped of his victory in the 2005 Vuelta a España and suspended for two years after testing positive for EPO.
Sports lawyer Michelle Gallen has said that the pursuit of doping athletes has turned into a modern day witch-hunt.[65]
For extensive discussions of doping in the sport of competitive cycling, see:
Many sports organizations have banned the use of performance enhancing drugs and have very strict rules and consequences for people who are caught using them. The International Amateur Athletic Federation, now the International Association of Athletics Federations, were the first international governing body of sport to take the situation seriously. In 1928 they banned participants from doping, but with little in the way of testing available they had to rely on the word of the athlete that they were clean.
It was not until 1966 that FIFA (world football) and Union Cycliste Internationale (cycling) joined the IAAF in the fight against drugs, closely followed by the International Olympic Committee the following year.
Progression in pharmacology has always outstripped the ability of sports federations to implement rigorous testing procedures but since the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency in 1999 more and more athletes are being caught.
The first tests for athletes were at the 1966 European Championships and two years later the IOC implemented their first drug tests at both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Anabolic steroids became prevalent during the 1970s and after a method of detection was found they were added to the IOC's prohibited substances list in 1976.
Over the years, different sporting bodies have evolved differently to the war against doping. Some, such as athletics and cycling, are becoming increasingly vigilant against doping in their sports. However, there has been criticism that sports such as soccer and baseball are doing nothing about the issue, and letting athletes implicated in doping away unpunished. An example of this was Operation Puerto—approximately 200 sportspersons were implicated in blood doping. Of these, approximately 50 were cyclists and 150 were other sportspersons, including several "high profile soccer and tennis players" . The cyclists were pursued over their involvement, with many of them getting bans, such as Ivan Basso and Tyler Hamilton. By contrast, not a single soccer player involved in the doping ring was named, and to this day, all remain unpunished.
A handful of commentators maintain that, as outright prevention of doping is an impossibility, all doping should be legalised. Most disagree with this assertion, pointing out the claimed harmful long-term effects of many doping agents. However, with no medical data to support these claimed health problems, it is, at best, questionable. Opponents claim that with doping legal, all competitive athletes would be compelled to use drugs, and the net effect would be a level playing field but with widespread health consequences. Considering that anti-doping is largely ineffective due to both testing limitations and lack of enforcement, this is not markedly different than the situation already in existence.
Another point of view is that doping could be legalized to some extent using a drug whitelist and medical counseling, such that medical safety is ensured, with all usage published. Under such a system, it is likely that athletes would attempt cheat by exceeding official limits to try to gain an advantage; this could be considered conjecture as drug amounts do not always correlate linearly with performance gains. To police such a system could be as difficult as policing a total ban on performance enhancing drugs.
The Anti-Doping Convention of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg was opened for signature on 16 December 1989 as the first multilateral legal standard in this field. It has been signed by 48 states including the Council of Europe non-member states Australia, Belarus, Canada and Tunisia. The Convention is open for signature by other non-European states. It does not claim to create a universal model of anti-doping, but sets a certain number of common standards and regulations requiring Parties to adopt legislative, financial, technical, educational and other measures.
The main objective of the Convention is to promote the national and international harmonisation of the measures to be taken against doping. In their constitutional provisions, each contracting party undertakes to:
Furthermore the Convention describes the mission of the Monitoring Group set up in order to monitor its implementation and periodically re-examine the List of prohibited substances and methods which can be found in annex to the main text.
An Additional Protocol to the Convention entered into force on 1 April 2004 with the aim of ensuring the mutual recognition of anti-doping controls and of reinforcing the implementation of the Convention using a binding control system.
Professor Donald A. Berry has argued that the closed systems used by anti-doping agencies do not allow scientific (statistical) validation of the tests.[67] This argument was seconded by an accompanying editorial in the magazine Nature (7 August 2008).[68]
Under established doping control protocols, the participant will be asked to provide a urine sample, which will be divided into two, each portion to be preserved within sealed containers bearing the same unique identifying number and designation respectively as A- and B-samples.[69]
WADA's Executive Committee and Foundation Board clarified at a meeting on 19–20 November, that an athlete whose A-sample has revealed the presence of a prohibited substance or method to request the analysis of his or her B-sample.
"The B-sample helps confirm that an anti-doping rule violation has occurred and protects the rights of the athletes", said WADA Director General David Howman. "It should be stressed that anti-doping is one of the few types of controls in society in which a confirmation procedure is used in order to protect individuals, and the very rare cases in which the analysis of the B-sample did not match the results of the A-sample have shown the usefulness of such procedure."[70]
Athletes seeking to avoid testing positive for doping use various methods to cheat on the drug tests. The most common methods include:
G. Pascal Zachary argues in a Wired essay[71] that legalizing performance-enhancing substances, as well as genetic and cyborg enhancements once they became available, would satisfy society's need for übermenschen and reverse the decline in public interest in sports.
Despite the serious health problem brought by PEDs, some athletes point to the already dangerous environment in sports like football and martial arts and wonder if there is a double standard where health concerns brought by the aggressive nature of these sports is viewed acceptable but not PEDs.[72]
Anti-doping policies instituted by individual sporting governing bodies may conflict with local laws. Notable case includes the National Football League (NFL) inability to suspend players found with banned susbstances; after it was ruled by a federal court, that local labor laws superseded the NFL's anti-doping regime. The challenge was supported by the National Football League Players Association.[73][74]
In December 2007 George Mitchell released his report on steroid usage in baseball. Major League Baseball asked Mitchell to conduct an independent investigation to see how bad steroid use was in baseball. In the report Mitchell covers many topics and he interviewed over 700 witnesses. He covers the effects of steroids on the human body. He also touches on Human Growth Hormone effects. He reports on baseball's drug testing policies before 2002 and the newer policies after 2002. Mitchell also named 86 players in the report that had some kind of connection to steroids. Among those named were: Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and Eric Gagne. And to finish his report he made suggestions to the commissioner of baseball about drug testing and violations of the drug testing policies.[75][76]