PED in American Sports

Essay by pereranj3College, UndergraduateB, November 2014

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John Doe

Professor Smith

English 102

24 November 2014

Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED) in American Sports

Performance enhancing drugs have been a huge negative factor within the last century in American sports, forcing law makers and sports organizations to be obligated to make necessary changes because of the complexity in detecting these drugs in the human body, insufficient testing done on players by organizations, and long term health complications leading to even severe result such as death. Performance enhancing drugs used by athletes today include Human Growth Hormone (HGH), anabolic steroids, peptide hormones, amphetamines, insulin and stimulants. The reason athletes use performance enhancing drugs is to increase the amount of testosterone produced in the body. The increased testosterone in the body increases muscle strength by enabling new muscle growth.

Use of drugs to enhance the performance by athletes has been reported as early as in beginning of the twentieth century.

Painkillers were one of first substances athletes used to gain some advantage of playing every day. In 1950's when Anabolic steroids, which builds muscle and bone mass by stimulating the muscle and bone cells to make new protein, made it to the sport locker rooms and coaches and athletes made this innovative drugs as the next step to revolutionized sports. However, only during the World Games in Moscow in 1956 was the first indication of steroid usage by athletes to come out to the general population. According to Robert Voy book, Drugs, Sports, and Politics, and a American doctor, John Ziegler, observed few athletes from the Soviet Union who had enlarged prostate and had been using catheters when urinating due to the usage of steroids. They came back to the United States and helped develop the first known steroid called Dianobol, which was quickly spread amongst the American athletes.