Anti-doping Policies: Choosing Between Imperfections
In this chapter we suggest an alternative way of dealing with the problem of doping in sports. We find that today’s anti-doping policies are excessive, mostly driven by ideology and political convenience, ethically problematic, insufficiently effective, c
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Anti-doping Policies: Choosing Between Imperfections Bengt Kayser and Barbara Broers
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Introduction
A series of widely publicized doping scandals and public outrage at the end of last century triggered an increasingly strong movement advocating doping-free sports, which led to the inception of the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) in 1999. WADA aims at harmonizing anti-doping practices worldwide and is helped by the fact that a majority of UN member states signed the UNESCO anti-doping convention. Even though the principle of the anti-doping rule is simple, its implementation needs a complicated, highly technical and costly organisation. Still, anti-doping cannot achieve its declared objective, the eradication of doping. Even more, anti-doping policies are ethically problematic, and possibly lead to more harm to society than they prevent (e.g. Amos 2008; Kayser and Smith 2008). Anti-doping seems therefore not a solution, but an increasingly costly imperfection. We think that the discussions on doping and anti-doping should not ignore these imperfect practical outcomes of current anti-doping policies, in elite sports and in amateur and outside sports. In this chapter we therefore suggest an alternative way of dealing with the problem of doping in sports. We do this by drawing parallels between anti-doping and the ‘war on drugs’, a mainly USA-led worldwide effort to rid society from illicit psychotropic drugs. This comparison is not as farfetched as it initially appears. In fact, the ‘war on drugs’ and anti-doping share various features, such as This chapter is partly based on material published in a paper by the same authors: Kayser B, Broers B. 2012. “The Olympics and Harm Reduction?.” Harm Reduction Journal 9 (1): 33. doi:10.1186/1477-7517-9-33. (Creative Commons Attribution License) B. Kayser (*) Institute of Movement Sciences and Sports Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, 10, rue du Conseil Général, 1205, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] B. Broers Unit for Dependency in Primary Care, Department of Community Health and Primary Care, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland J. Tolleneer et al. (eds.), Athletic Enhancement, Human Nature and Ethics, International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine 52, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5101-9_15, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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similarities between policies based on repression and surveillance, black markets controlled by organized crime, attempts to shape internationally harmonized legal frameworks, ideology and political convenience anchored in media-fuelled moral outrages. Furthermore, as a detail, but an illustrative one, the presence of cannabis derivatives, drugs less dangerous for the user and society than alcohol or tobacco, on the list of forbidden substances in sports, even though there are no known proven performance enhancing effects but rather evidence for the contrary. We first discuss past and current policies for psychotropic drug use and then draw pa
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