High Time To Make Some Rules

There follows a listing of what kinds of drugs are considered hypnotic, depressant, stimulatory, narcotic—almost all fall into one category or another. The rules, and the drugs banned, vary slightly from state to state. For example, if the Kentucky Derby was the Colorado Derby, there would have been no Dancer's Image scandal, Butazolidin being legal in Colorado. However, the list of illegal drugs is, by and large, much the same everywhere. It is a long one, as racing commissions have also avoided trying to make fine technical distinctions between restorative and additive drugs. If, for example, a horse has a sore leg and is given a drug such as Butazolidin, most racing commissions assume the motive was to remove the soreness, thus enabling the horse to run faster than he otherwise might. Therefore, giving Butazolidin is doping—tampering with performance.

Nor have racing commissions entered into arguments about the effectiveness of various drugs: does Butazolidin, a tranquilizer or an amphetamine actually make a horse run faster? Horsemen have no better information on the subject than medicine men in other sports. The position of racing commissions is simply that if something is used with the intent of altering performance, the assumption will be that it does. "Butazolidin—or almost anything else—is dope because we say it is dope" is the essence of the regulations. This is an arbitrary, unscientific approach, but a practical one. Few other sports have been able to agree on this fundamental issue of what is dope, though enough formal definitions have been offered from time to time to fill a medium-sized rule book. Some of these include:

?"The intake of substances aiming to artificially increase during a competition the performance of the competitor with detriment to the morale of the competitor and to his physical and psychic integrity must be considered doping."—Italian Federation of Sports Medicine.

?"The use of any drug—effective or not—given with the intent to increase the performance in competition, must be considered as doping."—The German League of Sports Physicians

?"Doping is the administration to, or the use by, a healthy individual of an agent foreign to the organism by whatsoever route introduced, or of physiological substances in abnormal quantities or introduced by an abnormal route with the sole object of increasing artificially and in an unfair manner the performance of that subject while participating in a competition. Certain psychological procedures designed to increase the performance of the subject may be regarded as doping."—Council of Europe Committee for Out-of-School Education.

All such definitions can be quickly attacked, and usually reduced to absurdity. "What," argues Dr. H. Kay Dooley, of Pomona, Calif., "is the ethical difference between giving anabolic steroids and wrapping an ankle? Both are done in an attempt to help the athlete perform better."

In May 1964 a conference on doping sponsored by UNESCO was convened in Belgium. The three-day affair, which drew 40 of the world's leading sports physicians and physiologists, foundered on its first question—what is doping? After listening to one particularly weighty, academic definition, Professor Ernst Jokl, head of the first German institute on sports medicine and now a physiologist at the University of Kentucky, snorted "Medieval Scholasticism." He then suggested that three steaks eaten by a hammer thrower might be a physiological substance in abnormal quantity and therefore dope.

One possible way out of the definition morass was suggested by Professor E. J. Ariens, a Dutch physician. He would, by fiat, declare that there is no such thing as doping; let anyone take anything he wants so long as he gets it from a licensed physician. Said Ariens at the UNESCO conference: "We live in a time when sportsmen are sold from one league or club to another. There is a gliding scale from pure professionalism in sport via semiprofessionalism and quasi-nonprofessionalism to true uncomplicated sportive competition by amateurs Rigid training schedules of eight hours and more a day are accepted and considered 'natural.' Maybe for certain forms of professionalism in sport, the acceptance of expert-controlled conditioning by drugs would be less detrimental than today's clandestine and backward use of these means, which brings about unnecessary risks for the health of many of our favorite sportsmen."

Ariens' approach has the obvious advantage of doing away with hypocrisy, which in itself is one of the most corrupting features of drug usage. However, the proposal has several serious drawbacks, the most important of which has already been noted: the use of drugs strikes at the fundamental nature of sport, namely, competition between equals. Given their head, most athletes and their attendants could be expected to start a mad scramble, a sort of sports equivalent of the arms race, as they tried to find new, secret drugs that would give them at least a temporary advantage over the opposition. The winners in such a situation might well not be the best athletes but the richest, those with the best technological resources at their disposal.

"We are already reaching the point, in the Olympics, for example, where competitors from affluent, developed nations have a real advantage," says Dr. Allan J. Ryan of the University of Wisconsin. "If we don't do something to control drug use, this could bring about the same situation in many sports. Suppose, though I don't think it is the case, that $150 worth of anabolic steroids would improve the performance of a high school football player by 10%. The boys who can spend $150, or the teams that can pay $3,000 or so for the drugs, are theoretically going to have a 10% advantage over those that can't."