In defense of medically supervised doping

ABSTRACT

We propose that doping be legalized under medical supervision. First, we discuss two motivations for allowing medically supervised doping. We reject the ‘compromised choice/harm minimization’ motivation as unlikely to win the support of athletes. We agree that it could lead to an arms race. Instead, we favor full acceptance of doping under medical supervision and answer Reid’s spirit of sport objection to medical manipulation. After presenting a set of guiding principles, we use them to answer the arms race objection and rebut one of the most prominent objections in the literature about the safety of medically supervised doping, the game-theoretic objection.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-doping
• WADA
• PED
• medical supervision

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. John Russell, private communication.

2. Most of our examples come from professional cycling because that is a sport that we are well-informed about and that has experienced many doping scandals. However, the points apply mutatis mutandis to all sports.

3. A version of these principles appears in Jo Morrison’s thesis, ‘Anti-Doping Policy: The Emperor’s New Clothes’, submitted for M.Phil at The Open University, March 2022.

4. E.g. Jon Pike during the question-and-answer session at IAPS, 2017.