by Larry Lounsbury

Created on: June 18, 2009   Last Updated: July 04, 2009

Abusing their bodies.

The Use and Abuse of Drugs in the Olympic Games

According to a definition from World Book Dictionary, a drug is a substance (other than food), that when taken into the body, produces a change in it. If this change helps the body, the drug is referred to as a medicine. If the change harms the body, the drug is referred to as a poison. The use of drugs to enhance sporting performance, or "doping" has occurred throughout history and has been responsible for some improved sporting performances. However, "doping" is ethically unacceptable and has been responsible for the ill health and even death, of some athletes.

Athletes have used performance-enhancing drugs for decades. In 1968 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned the use of performance-enhancing substances to promote fair play in competition. At that time the banned substances were primarily anabolic steroids and amphetamines.

Other athletic associations and sport governing bodies soon followed suit by adopting similar bans, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which adopted a drug-testing program to promote fair and equitable competition and to safeguard the health and safety of student-athletes. Since then the specified number of banned substances has risen dramatically as athletes are driven to finding new ways to obtain a competitive edge and/or to avoid detection.

In the earlier Olympic Games, the drugs of choice included strychnine, heroin, cocaine, and morphine. The first "effective" performance-enhancing drugs, the amphetamines, were widely used by soldiers during the Second World War and crossed over into sports in the early 1950s.

These drugs minimize the sensation of fatigue during exercise, which is the body's way of protecting itself from over-exertion. Cyclists have died of heat stroke while using amphetamines. To avoid detection, athletes simply substitute a clean urine sample for a doped specimen.

The prototype for another group of potent performance-enhancing drugs, anabolic steroids, was synthesized in 1936 and appeared in sport sometime after the 1948 Olympic Games. By increasing muscle size, the anabolic steroids increase strength, power, and sprinting speed; they also alter mood and speed the rate of recovery after exertion.

For maximum effect, steroids are used in combination with hormones that have similar activity, including insulin and growth factor. There are multiple side effects, including death. Designer steroids have

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