Why They Juice: The Role of Social Forces in Performance Enhancing Drug Use by Professional Athletes

Abstract

Why do some athletes use performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), while others opt not to use? Past research has focused on individual player attributes associated with PED use, but has left social factors unstudied. Utilizing novel datasets on PED use in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and Major League Baseball (MLB), we explore the role that social forces play in PED use in pro sports. We find that PED use is concentrated in certain teams, that teams experience team-specific periods of heightened drug use, and that clean MLB players who transfer to a new team with PED users on it are more likely to begin using PEDs than those who transfer to a clean team. While we stress the limitations to the use of observational data on PED use (most significantly, false negatives), we take these findings to suggest that an athlete's decision to use PEDs is, to an important degree, determined by the immediate social environment.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the American Sociological Association and National Science Foundation for their financial support of this project. We also owe a debt of gratitude to Carrie L. Shandra, Michael Schwartz, Michael Restivo, N. Michelle Shepherd, Eran Shor, Naomi Rosenthal, and Terri Tiso, as well as the members of the Stony Brook Sociology Grant Workshop for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.