Why we should allow performance enhancing drugs

[Minionman]

I don't know enough about the current medical aspects to know how realistic strict enforcement could be.  But even if banning the drugs is completely unenforcible, I think you probably have to ban many of them anyway.

The author here is mostly focusing on the Olympics and high profile, international competition.  However, the real impact of sports is that virtually everyone plays them casually, and an awful lot of people play competitively at least for some period of time.  They are part of the way we grow up and learn to live in a competitive society.

I get a bit squeamish about taking drugs.  I would not want to go into work and have my boss encouraging me to take a stimulant (much less something more drastic) to improve my performance.  If my work happened to be professional sports, I still wouldn't want that.  I would want it even less for school kids to get that pressure from their teammates or coaches.

When you take something that can have a drastic impact on performance, and you make it a sanctioned part of the sport, it puts a lot of pressure on all of the participants to do it just to stay in the sport.  Even if we are talking about aspirin, there is a point at which it gets very unsafe (it's probably fortunate that the degree of sports improvement from aspirin isn't greater than it is, or we would have 10 year olds overdosing all over the place).  The rules exist for a reason, and in my opinion they have been enforced too loosely at every level.
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First post, I wasn't too interested, since I don't watch much sports and don't really care about steroids or other "enhancers", but this post does change some of that.