Impact Of The Use Of Performance Enhancing Drugs On Professional Sports

In professional sports, most of the athletes that compete are good enough to be in their respective leagues, but due to the many pressures of being a professional athlete, they turn to the usage of performance enhancing drug in order to enhance their athletic skills. Professional athletes take performance enhancement drugs believing that it will give them a competitive edge. Performance enhancing drugs are substances that will improve a person’s physical ability and stamina during competition. Athletes take steroids for numerous reasons. To build muscle mass, reduce weight, dull pain, and to get their optimal playing weight. Steroids can be injected or ingested orally. The abuse of steroids can lead to debilitating side effects. In professional sports, there has been a great deal of media coverage regarding these drugs and their usage in professional sports.

Anabolic Steroids are a type of performance enhancing drug that increases muscle mass. They are the type of hormone that increases your appetite, bone growth, and the protein synthesis needed for rapid muscle growth. Anabolic steroids have several serious side effects linked to its usage. The physiological side effects are; acne, liver damage, and stunt growth issues. The physiological side effects are; increased aggressiveness and sexual appetite. This sometimes results in abnormal sexual and criminal behavior. This type of erratic behavior is called “Roid Rage”. For athletes who attempt to quit using performance enhancing drugs suffer from withdrawal symptoms. These symptoms have been associated with depression and suicide. You also have diuretics that are being ingested by athletes. Diuretics, which increase the frequency of urination, are used to artificially speed up the weight loss process in order to enhance performance. Users often suffer from serious side effects from using diuretics. Light-headedness and fainting spells are the most common side-effects that users suffer from. Some of the most prominent athletes of all in all of sports has either admitted to the use of performance enhancing drugs or have tested positive for steroids. Highschool kids are now experiencing with steroids. This has led to high school campuses across the nation to impose a random drug testing policy to any athlete that wishes to compete in amateur sports. According to a statement from the American College of Sports Medicine, it is becoming increasingly obvious that anabolic steroids use is not limited to just professional, Olympic, and college athletes. There is a growing body of evidence that reflects that high school and junior high students are using steroids.

Lifetime prevalence rates for steroid use generally range between 4 and 12 % among male adolescents and between 0,5 and 2% For female adolescents. A review of nationwide studies of steroid use among adolescents shows a mixed trend between 1989 and 1996. In one study using 1989 steroid usage rates for both sexes as a benchmark, there was a significant decline in use between 1989-1996. Since 1991, however, steroid use by males, as measured by 2 of 3 national surveys, has been generally stable. Furthermore, since 1991 data from these same 3 national surveys point to a significant increase in steroid use among adolescent females. The 1995 Youth Risk and Behavior Surveillance System showed that among high school students in both public and private schools in the. Grades 9-12, some 4.9 % of males and 2.4% of females have used anabolic steroids at least once. Furthermore, the use of steroids by adolescents is not limited to the United States, Studies in Canada. South Africa, England, and Sweden have reported overall levels of steroid use for high-school age students like those in the U.S. There are significant questions that accompany the use of performance enhancing drugs. Society feels that performance enhancing drugs gives its user an unfair advantage. In addition to that, people have a negative opinion on the side effects of PED’s and claim that overusing the drugs will cause significant health issues.

Recently, the controversy surrounding the use of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs by Olympic and professional athletes has captured the media spotlight, in part as a response to the very public and pervasive steroids scandal plaguing Major League Baseball (MLB). This article examines trends in Americans’ attitudes toward the use of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs in Olympic and professional sport to better understand the messaging challenges that policy makers, players, managers, coaches, and publicists face when trying to influence the media agenda. In the 1980s and 1990s, concern over drug use by professional athletes was primarily driven using drugs like cocaine and heroin both on and off the field. Relatively few incidents concerning the illegal use of steroids most notably Ben Johnson’s contested 1988 Olympic victory in the 100-m dash captured the headlines. More recently, the number of professional athletes who have come to rely on performance-enhancing drugs including anabolic steroids and human growth hormone has grown, although official counts are hard to come by given the illegal nature of the substances in question. Legal sales of human growth hormone reached over $1 billion dollars in 2004, and it is estimated that sales have continued to grow over the last few years. As a result of this surge in legal, and presumably illegal, performance-enhancing-drug use, media coverage of the steroids controversy has subsequently increased, becoming a focus of evening news broadcasts, in-depth news programs, major sport magazines like Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine, blog posts, and late-night political satire. As a result, policy makers, players, managers, coaches, and publicists now face a communications challenge namely, to restore Americans’ faith in those who compete in professional and Olympic sport while spreading the message that steroid use is under control.

Only time will tell if the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs such as human growth hormone has done lasting damage to the world of professional sports, especially MLB, and has in turn affected the hearts and minds of American sports fans. Moreover, future evidence might confirm that the recreational use of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs has become a larger social problem, extending well beyond the world of competitive sport.