Julian Savulescu, professor of practical ethics at the University of Oxford, says: To say that we should reduce drugs in sport or eliminate them because they increase performance, is simply like saying that we should eliminate alcohol from parties because it increases sociability. So our proposal is that we allow a modest approach. … Our proposal is enforceable, it frees up the limited resources to focus on drugs that may be affecting children, which we grant should not have access to drugs … As weve argued, performance enhancement is not against the spirit of sport, its been a part of sport through its whole history, and to be human is to be better, or at least to try to be better.

With benefits of steroids reaching every home and steroids easily available on the web, the success and popularity of steroids has reached an all-time high these days. The success of steroids has allured some people, acting as critics, to raise a voice against them. This is because opposition of some popular product does bring name to them and who does not want instant and free publicity. What these people forget is the fact that steroids are not harmful unless they are abused.

Since steroids have been helping professional athletes and other sportsmen to deliver dramatic performance, people needing easy publicity are seen accusing them with talks about steroids. These baseless accusations about gaining an unfair advantage are absolutely rubbish. Steroids offer the way through which sportsmen can think beyond the normal and there cannot be anything wrong in thinking for the better.

Sportsmen which used doping Doping in sport is not a new phenomenon; athletes have taken performance- enhancing agents since the beginning of time. The legendary Arthurian knights supposedly drank magical potions from the cup of Merlin. Our own Celtic tales describe the use of strengthening potions to aid valor in battle and the druids' use of narcotics is well documented by historians. The berserkers', a class of ancient Norse warriors who fought frenziedly, "berserk" behavior was attributed to a deliberate diet of wild mushrooms. The Ancient Olympics in Greece were riddled with corruption and doping to the extent that the games had to be dissolved.

In Ancient Rome, gladiators drank herbal infusions to strengthen them before chariot races and going into battle. Almost two millenia later, the first documented report in the medical literature was published in 1865 in the British Medical Journal, citing expulsion of a swimmer from an Amsterdam canal race, for taking an unnamed performance- enhancing drug. The first doping death occurred in 1886 in cycling. History of doping

In 1960, the Danishn cyclist Kurt Jensen died after overdosing of amphetamine in an attempt to seek competitive advantage and the search for control. Methods of anti-doping control were first pioneered in the 1960s, by Arnold Beckett, an academic pharmacist with a specialist interest in sports pharmacy, based at Kings College London. It was however the televised death of the British cyclist Tommy Simpson, while under the influence of amphetamine during the 1967 Tour de France, that proved the catalyst for implementation of official anti-doping control systems and the banning of amphetamine in international sport. Cycling has long since been a harbinger for systematic doping and as one top cyclist explained "it is impossible to finish in the top five of a Tour de France without doping"

In the UK, many were shocked by the Lindford Christie saga, however he first tested positive in 1988, at the start of his career, for the banned stimulant pseudoephedrine; not surprisingly he has now lost the contract for whiter than white whites. It was the Irish swimmer Michelle Smith de Bruin who brought the reality of doping home to our own doorstep; while the country was divided in 1998 as to whether she was a sporting Jenny or a bold deceiver, the IOC confirmed that there was "Whiskey in the Jar" and the amount therein defied all possible human consumption.

The End