Anti-Doping Policy, Health, and Harm

ABSTRACT

The anti-doping policies of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) aim to promote a level playing field and protect the health of the athlete. Anti-doping policy discourages research using performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) or methods and prohibits athlete support personnel, including healthcare providers, from providing advice, assistance, or aid to an athlete or others seeking to use, or using PEDs until harm has occurred. Athletes are individually responsible for the presence of a prohibited substance in their bodies and face sanction regardless of knowledge or intent. I will argue (i) that WADA policies fail to meet the epistemic and control conditions needed to adequately assign individual responsibility and (ii) that transferring responsibility for use of PEDs solely to the athlete results in harm. WADA is drifting perilously close to the morally impermissible ‘doing of harm’ to athletes by initiating or sustaining a causal sequence of events that can result in harm.

KEYWORDS:

• Health
• harm
• WADA
• doping
• anti-doping policy

Acknowledgments

This material appears as a chapter in the author’s thesis ‘Anti-Doping Policy: The Emperor’s New Clothes’ submitted for an M.Phil at The Open University in March 2022. The author gratefully acknowledges the thoughtful and critical guidance of Dr Sean Cordell and Dr Jon Pike.

Disclosure statement

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