Francis Arthur A.

Corpuz
3BLM
THIS HOUSE WOULD PERMIT THE USE OF PERFORMANCE ENHANCING
DRUGS IN PROFESSIONAL SPORTS

They say that the professional sports are the celebration of human prowess
and excellence, where people can display their strength and wits as they battle out
each other in different sports. These sports show raw skills that a human being can
achieve ultimately.
An alarming number of professional sports today, such as baseball, football,
track and field, basketball, and some other sports which are included even in the
Olympics have however been shaken by doping scandals in recent years. Many
athletes have indulged in using performance-enhancing drugs to further improve
their capabilities when they engage in these sports. This is to stretch out the idea
that a human being can physically achieve more things and even exceed inherent
human limits.
Despite the issues on fairness and how it tarnishes the truest essence of
sports, we think that we should still permit the use of performance-enhancing drugs
among athletes who prefer to use them--as long as we can ensure that the side
effects can be removed, or at the very least, mitigated. If those are assured, we see
nothing wrong with the usage of these enhancers.
Performance-enhancing drugs include steroids (the male hormone
testosterone), Human-growth hormone, recombinant erythropoietin, an artificial
hormone and other drugs taken to build muscle-bulk during training, and stimulants
or blood-doping taken to improve performance in competition.
I'm going to first discuss two things before I raise my points: Firstly is how do
we ensure the eradication of these harmful side effects in our side, and secondly is
how do we still ensure that there is fairness in these sports even with our policy.
How do we ensure the eradication of the harmful side effects? By legitimizing
the use of these performance-enhancing drugs through permission, the companies
which are selling these drugs will get more profit. These profits then will be derived
for further research on how to create effective and safer drugs compared to the
ones that they are selling right now. We can ensure that the effectiveness and
safety of the consumption of these drugs are not only achievable, but more
sustainable.
Secondly, how do we then ensure that there can still be fair play in sports?
We think that the general idea is about still having a fair game with your opponents.
The essence of sports inherently run through the principle of fairness and even in

the existence of permitted enhancement drugs, the sports have their own
mechanism to instill fairness. Rules set forth during games can still promote fair
play among others. Let's be clear: What we want to achieve in our side is to make
these drugs accessible and to give athletes an option for the improvement of their
performance.
Now I'm going to discuss my main arguments: Firstly: why is the permission
of these enhancing drugs legitimate in the first place, and secondly how do we
promote freedom of choice to these athletes who are, at the end of the day,
consenting adults.
Onto my first argument: the legitimacy of our policy. We need to understand
that the delineation between what is natural and unnatural is already immaterial
the sports. When we entered the modern the post-modern era, human beings
naturally became more conscious on their physical limitations and how to break
them up to some extent. There are diets suggested to improve ones metabolism,
surgeries which alter the body structure to make it more strong and rigid, and many
other additional procedures which aim to improve ones athletic capabilities or such.
These conventionally-accepted procedures are disguised as something normal and
natural, but in fact these things are all unnatural. These procedures alter the
performance of athletes unnaturally, since we can conclude that the definition of
something achieved naturally is about exerting raw and pure effort to improve. All
these procedures are modified to improve ones capabilities as an athlete. If these
procedures are accepted as legitimate forms of enhancing oneself, so should
performance-enhancing drugs be.
Aside from that, we need to understand as well that sports is a career.
Fashion and fitness models who pose in front of cameras for cover pages of
magazines also evolve in their careers of modelling through unnatural process.
Their beauty can be digitized until it suits to perfection. These parallelisms are
enough evidence to say that permitting the use of these performance-enhancing
drugs are legitimate.
My second idea is simple: how to we promote the freedom of choice to these
athletes. This argument can run and engage on the worst case scenario: that even if
corporations receive large profit in attempt to remove side effects, these side
effects cannot be removed altogether. We need to realize that the athletes we are
talking about in this debate is focused on adults who can give out their consent.
Inasmuch as adults indulge into unhealthy lifestyles such as smoking and drinking,
what the state can only do is to regulate and control these vices. The same principle
runs in our policy. The athletes who are indulging in these types of drugs are adults
and are consenting. This is how we mobilize the choices of these athletes: give
them an option on which modes are the best for their improvement as an athlete.
We can trace back the promotion of freedom of choice to the states primordial goal:

to make sure that every individual is mobilized in the societyfree from constraints
on their choices.
The idea of permitting the use of performance-enhancing drugs sends out the
message that these procedures are fine. As long as the state regulates these drugs,
as much as they regulate other vices, we see nothing wrong with this. After all,
these sports have evolved from only being a celebration of human capabilities to a
spectacle of human progress not only in beating your limitations, but by being what
you really want to be.