I have a few responses to this. First, I'm not arguing for "anything goes". I think performance enhancing drugs should be made available by prescription and require approval of a sports physician of sorts.
Second, training injuries are quite common. A large fraction (perhaps even the vast majority) of my runner friends have had at least moderate injuries from training, and I see no one arguing to ban running in particular. It seems fairly clear to me that a smaller fraction of people who do performance enhancing drugs right now develop problems equivalent in severity. If you have evidence suggesting otherwise, I'd be interested in hearing it.
Third, some performance enhancing drugs seem fairly safe. Take EPO for example. While I'm not an expert, it seems that even massive overdoses are not that bad:
In these two cases reported, these patients, even after massive overdose, tolerated it relatively well and the only side-effects we found were elevated liver enzyme and haemoglobin levels.
Would you be okay with legalizing performance enhancing drugs which have been demonstrated to be safe?
(Oh, and people reading this, don't read this as "EPO is safe" because I have not investigated that in depth. I'm arguing on the principle that some performance enhancing drugs have less potential for harm than others.)
Let me start by saying that I think people should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies.
Having said this, I am wary of setting up an incentive system where you're encouraging people to achieve superior performance during seconds or minutes at potentially high long-term cost. We probably have different central examples in mind -- what comes to my mind is not steroids with lesser side effects or better versions of EPO, but rather PCP to suppress pain and something to throw your metabolism into overdrive (e.g. at the cost of future cancer).
...I th
This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.
This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.
Rules for this thread:
If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :