1988, Seoul, South Korea, Summer Olympics. Ben Johnson used steroids to win a gold medal, in a world record sprint. Once news was out that Johnson had used PED’s, he was stripped of his metal. Why? The answer is quite simple, he cheated. Imagine being on a diet, this diet is consisted of several weeks, wherein you will only eat fresh fruits, vegetables, and maybe some cooked rice once in a while. You on this diet with several friends, you all agreed to do this diet, no matter what. A few weeks go by, you have faithfully kept your diet and now, you are positively starving for something that is, well, a little less nutritious. You go to a chocolate store and are surrounded in glorious junk food. You’re tempted, really tempted but, once you start thinking of your friends, who they have been faithfully keeping the diet, you just can’t do it. So you walk away. The diet ends and you all have lost weight, one friend in particular has lost a lot of weight. You and all your friends congratulate her. However, a few weeks later, you find out that your friend had only been with you on the diet for about 2 weeks. The rest of you went through the entire thing, and she still lost more weight than you. Unfair right?

            Then imagine training for the Olympics, you work as hard as you can, but your still second place. You then find that the winner didn’t accomplish his feat on his own skill. He accomplished it with drugs. Although Ben Johnson won, his victory was short lived, if he had just put in the time, and done it on his own, everything would have been fine.

            The show and recognition of human physical achievement is what makes sports enjoyable for anyone. If you went to a track meet, and everyone there either won or lost, based on how many drugs they took, it would not be that entertaining would it? Nor would it be a good example for anyone to live up to. For any parent it seems only reasonable they would not want their child looking up at them at the age of five and say, “When I grow up I want to be just like him!”.  When hearing that about someone on drugs, that parent would most likely want to have a heart attack.

            Besides this, sports are there to show off the achievements others have made, when suddenly it’s not them making an achievement, it is a drug. Something that cannot think, speaks, and cannot act in any way on its own and yet it is being recognized for achievement.

            Further more, when athletes take drugs, they then pressure others to do the same, even without meaning to. Even though you’re already ruing your life, as well as your family’s by forming an addiction, and as if that’s not bad enough, the peer pressure is there as well and instead of just you and your family you have ruined countless other lives as well. There is also the risk of, not that you’ve formed an addiction, committing crimes and going to jail. The other risk is to their health, no doctor ever said that smoking pot was good for you. Even if that’s not what they are doing, even if it seems like a “little thing” like PED’s, it could always lead to something bigger and it works either way.  

If not for the sake of the sport, for the sake of the young kids and athletes playing them, Performance Enhancing Drugs, need to continue to stay banned from most if not all sports.