The Coercive Power of Drugs in Sports

O ur images of the nonmedical drug user normally include the heroin addict nodding in the doorway, the spacedout marijuana smoker, and maybe, if we know that alcohol is a drug, the wino sprawled on the curb. We probably do not think of the Olympic gold medalist, the professional baseball player who is a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, or the National Football League lineman. Yet these athletes and hundreds, perhaps thousands of others regularly use drugs in the course of their training, performance, or both. I am talking not about recreational drug use-athletes use drugs for pleasure and relaxation probably no more or less than their contemporaries with comparable incomes-but about a much less discussed type of drug use: taking drugs to enhance performance. It is a strange idea. Most of us think of drugs in one of two ways. Either they are being properly used by doctors and patients to make sick people well or at least to stem the ravages of illness and pain, or they are being misused-we say abused-by individuals in pursuit of unworthy pleasures. Performance-enhancing drug use is so common and so tolerated in some forms that we often fail to think of it as