Slashdot Mirror
Let the Games Be Doped
Hugh Pickens writes "John Tierney poses the question in the New York Times 'what if we let athletes do whatever they wanted to excel?' Before you dismiss the notion, consider what we're stuck with today — a system designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes' health and set an example for children, that fails on all counts. The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that 'antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear' by relying on unscientifically calibrated tests, like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory and even if the authorities manage to correct their tests, they can't possibly keep up with the accelerating advances in biology." Read on for more.
Hugh Pickens continues: "Bengt Kayser, the director of a sports medicine institute at the University of Geneva argues in an article that has been supported by more than 30 scholars in the British Medical Journal that legalizing doping would "encourage more sensible, informed use of drugs in amateur sport, leading to an overall decline in the rate of health problems associated with doping (pdf). In the competition between increasingly sophisticated doping — e.g. gene transfer — and antidoping technology, there will never be a clear winner. Consequently, such a futile but expensive strategy is difficult to defend.""
Not even if their healthy lives depend on it?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
I personally look forward to the All Drug Olympics!
FAIL! AFAIK, anabolic steroids (the ones talked about in relation to doping) are not used for treating skin conditions. It seems you don't actually know what your dad was taking.
Usually when people talk "steroids", they mean "performance enhancing drugs". I guess we should try and filter out pseudo-scientific vocabulary in popular speak, but that's the way it is I guess.