Use And Abuse Of Drugs In Sports - Essay Example

Many professional athletes, especially football and baseball players, have used cocaine during the playing season, and sometimes amphetamines during the games themselves. Some of these players turned in brilliant performances, suggesting that the consumption of cocaine, like amphetamines, may be beneficial for speed and strength, at least in the short run. In a sports "scandal," the Commissioner of the National Football League suspended four players for four games of the 1983 season because of their involvement with drugs.

One of the four, defensive endsRoss Browner, had set a Super Bowl record of 10 unassisted tackles. Another, running back Pete Johnson, was the all-time leading rusher for the Cincinnati Bengals. A third, a rookie, finished third in team tackles. It seems doubtful that cocaine hurt their playing. (Howe, 125-126) Drug abuse, one of the most sensitively charged and important issues facing athletics and society in general today, defies easy solutions. The problem of drug abuse has grown at all levels of athletic competition over the past two decades at a frightening speed, from the interscholastic to the Olympic and intercollegiate levels of competition.

In the United States, the increase of drug abuse in athletics reflects a like increase and, to a degree, acceptance of drugs among the general populace. It is a serious issue that includes health considerations, law enforcement problems, and moral/ethical questions for athletes, coaches, and athletic administrators. The growing awareness of the presence of drug use in the world of athletics has produced drug and alcohol awareness programs. In an increasing number of sports, from boxing to hockey and from athletics to basketball, there has been a striking rise in the detrimental usage of drugs to enhance players' performance, not only by professional sports men but also by amateurs.

In reply to global alarm over the occurrence of healthiness and other societal harms associated with the usage of illegal or prohibited drugs in competition of sports worldwide, World Health Organisation initiated an international programme to facilitate nations of the world to build up and carry out drugs abusage deterrence activities in 1992. (Massimino, 44)In present state world where only some glower on a cup of coffee to benefit in the morning, and where money plays such an vital and essential role in sports, it is difficult to influence sports men not to take performance improving illegal drugs.

In different corners of world even though prototypes of' drug usage are different varied; some shape of drug usage subsist in approximately all sports and across nearly every age group. The latent injurious and detrimental usage of drugs took many forms, including over usage of unproven food supplements and vitamins, negative dependence on therapeutic drag to treat wounds and injuries, and the taking of huge amount of anabolic steroids. The harmful drugs usage among sports men of the world is an element of an active and exceptionally complex procedure associated with physiological, social, psychological, economic and political variables.

No simple pattern of drugs usage materialized, apart from that an outsized number of nations and several different sports are affected. The efforts to standardize and manage the usage of drugs in sports have alerted on creating modern processes of checking and testing programmes. Checking and testing