Medicine Isn’t Always for the Ill: Allowing the Use of Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Sports In today’s ever-advancing world of science and medicine, the use of performance-enhancing drugs, or PED’s, is becoming increasingly more complex and abundant in professional sports, with competitive cycling having the highest number of reported cases. Performance-enhancing drugs have been used ever since the ancient Olympics in Greece and the popularity has only increased as it becomes easier to use and harder to detect. Due to the ineffectiveness of punishments, lack of accurate testing, and increased availability, performance-enhancing drugs will always find their way into sports, so instead of having athletes permanently barred from a sport they’ve devoted their lives to, and having innocent reputations tarnished from the false-positives of faulty tests, PED users should be included in their own separate league with …show more content…
Doping in cycling, along with the subsequent banning, has caused the sport to lose many perfectly healthy athletes willing to devote their lives to this sport. An incredible amount of potential is being lost whenever a cyclist is banned as a result of doping. Cyclists such as Marco Pantani were banned entirely from the sport after being discovered to have been doping during several competitions. This caused an extreme wave of depression and hard drug abuse in his life that led him to an eventual cocaine overdose. Pantani had overcome incredible injuries in which doctors said he may never walk normally again, only to get back on his bike with the help of performance-enhancing drugs and go on to win more races. A new league with acceptance of those types of drugs would allow athletes like Pantani to recover from injuries and continue their life’s work, instead of being forced to never compete