Why doping is consistent with the values of elite sports

Athletes who get caught doping are harshly criticized for "cheapening" their profession and making athletics unfair.

But University of Alberta research assistant Bryan Sluggett argues doping is actually consistent with the ideals of high-performance athletics, where athletes are encouraged to test the limits and break physical and mental boundaries. He wants to see doping regulated and says it's time to shift our approach to doping from a "criminal approach to a harm reduction approach where we can focus on regulating the health of athletes." 

Sluggett has a Master's degree in sociology from Simon Fraser University, where he studied doping in sports. His thesis was called "Creating the Pure Athlete: Discourses on Steroid Use and Prohibition in Sport."

The full interview is available in the audio player above. The following portions have been edited for clarity and length

Make the case that doping is consistent with performance sport. 

As science and technology have become more advanced, sport is really attempting to push through barriers and human limits that we thought were impossible to push through. It's not about trying to win, it's about trying to break through limits, and doping is entirely consistent with that.  In fact, we could make the case that it doesn't really make sense to ban drugs anymore because this is the purpose of sport now, to break these barriers. 

Why is a drug ban the wrong approach? 

It pushes the use of drugs, and our monitoring of the health of athletes underground. It creates a black market where we are unsure what athletes are using and it's very difficult to regulate. The drug ban itself creates unsafe conditions.

Sport is not fair to begin with. A good example is Novak Djokovic. He's not doping, but the approaches he takes to training are meant to push through natural barriers. He uses oxygen tanks and real time data tracking to improve his performance and he has a team of technical experts who help him with footwear, meal plans, medical specialists. And I think if we take a look at that, we can see the role science and technology has played in his ability to improve. Now obviously, he's an incredible hard worker and every high performance athlete is, but their ability to push through those performance barriers is definitely made possible by the advancements which fundamentally alter and change the biochemistry of the body. 

We've seen all the anger directed towards Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens or Lance Armstrong. What's wrong with the expectation that athletes are competing without the help of chemicals? 

That's not the reality of sport anymore. There is a mythical fantasy element to all of this where we like to pretend that we can compare athletes from the 1930s, 50s, and 70s, and 90s, and Barry Bonds is a good example because he just broke through Hank Aaron's record, a sacred one historically in baseball and people got angry and maybe rightly so, but the problem is that athletics has changed to the point that banning drugs is a difficult thing to do... I actually picked up this topic because I was burning angry with baseball. But I started understanding how athletes really trained and really prepared and the extent to which they go to manipulate their bodies, and I realized that doping is actually a side issue to the larger landscape of change that has taken place in sport. 

You draw a comparison between elite sports and the world of classical music. Tell us about that connection. 

In classical music...often through the performance you have people who in concert use beta-blockers, which reduces anxiety in their performance. And this is a good example where we don't really care if someone is using beta-blockers as long as the performance is good. Sport has become a unique cultural institution where we ask athletes to push through natural barriers and yet have some sort of authenticity in their performance, and we want to hold them back to some sort of standard from the 19th century. Essentially what we're asking them to do is impossible. 

Click the blue button above to listen to the full interview.