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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
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2 2 - 0 8 - 2 0 0 6 The doping of everyday life
The Boston Globe August 21, 2006
WHICH CONSUMERS of drugs should concern our society more? The steroid-loaded athletes who jack baseballs out of the park? Or steroid-loaded police officers who jack motorists out of their cars? The professional chess players who might take drugs to win modest cash prizes? Or the countless high school and college students who, we already know, are taking amphetamine-based stimulants, such as Ritalin and Adderall, to score high on the examinations that will set them up for life in professional careers? As these scenarios suggest, our current preoccupation with the doping practices of elite athletes has effectively concealed the fact that millions of people use a wide array of performance-enhancing drugs at home, in school, and on the job. For many people, a dedication to performance and productivity has already trumped the traditional capacity for self-restraint that is supposed to inhibit the use of drugs and other performance-enhancers for non-therapeutic purposes. Quite apart from the last 50 years of rampant drug use by athlete-workers, workplace doping has enjoyed a long tradition: amphetamines for long-distance drivers; mine workers chewing coca leaves high in the Andes; classical musicians on beta-blockers; steroids for police officers, prison guards, and bouncers; Prozac, Ritalin, cocaine, or methamphetamine for energy and self-confidence on the job; the new anti-narcoleptic modafinil (Provigil) for students and truckers; Red Bull, and other caffeine-delivery vehicles as an omnipresent workplace 'tonic'. Off-label use of testosterone and human growth hormone as an anti-aging therapy is rampant and, in the case of growth hormone, illegal. How many of these prescriptions are written to boost performance in competitive workplaces? The selective indignation we direct at athletes prompts us not to ask. Today's sports doping crisis can thus be understood as a kind of unofficial referendum on how our society feels about performance enhancements that promise tangible benefits to individuals and the larger society. Indeed, the more closely we examine the practices of doped athletes, the clearer their utilitarian goals become. And that makes them just like many other ambitious workers who are looking for a competitive edge. The doping conundrum that has raised disturbing questions about both athletic and non-athletic performances is as old as the production of effective pharmaceuticals. The use of amphetamines by students and truck drivers in the 1930s, for example, wrapped these drugs in an enduring aura of illegitimacy. Despite this 'disgrace', a US Air Force official told the American public in 1944, military pilots had to use Benzedrine to stay alert in combat. Fifty years later, most of the Air Force pilots who used Dexedrine during the first Persian Gulf War called it an 'essential' performance-enhancer. In this case, as during World War II, the rational use of an effective drug prevailed over the prohibitionist ethos of the war on drugs and its habit of stigmatizing them in indiscriminate ways. The problems that complicate defining legitimate and illegitimate uses of certain drugs, both inside and outside the sports world, were acknowledged in 1960 by a president of the American College of Sports Medicine. This physician commented on what he found to be a 'paradoxical attitude of many educators: whereas stimulating drugs like caffeine and amphetamine are accepted by common usage as permissible in cramming for intellectual examination and mental competition, these same substances have not found similar acceptability in athletic competition'. In fact, the educators of that time did not even recognize the academic doping that was going on under their noses. Boosting intellectual performance was their mission, while sportsmanship was for the less significant competitions that took place on the athletic field. Today the illogical distinction between athletic and academic doping is more important than ever. While drug testing of athletes has increased, surveillance of intellectual doping on campus has scarcely begun. The performance-enhancing effects of ADHD drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall exceed those of the classic amphetamines by promoting a supernormal capacity for mental focus. 'It's like tunnel vision', says one high school student. 'You're able to think really deeply about the subject.' Despite the sound and fury of the current campaign against anabolic steroids, it is small-town dealers and users, not celebrity athletes, who are doing hard time. The prime movers behind the Balco steroid scandal got sentences of three and four months. Not one of the East German sports doctors or coaches whose steroid regimens inflicted horrific medical damage on hundreds of female athletes has ever served a day in prison. Such legal travesties are just more evidence that modern societies appreciate the productive effects of performance-enhancing substances in ways that are hard to acknowledge to a public that has been told to wage an unrelenting war on 'drugs'. John Hoberman's books include 'Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping." He is a professor and chairman of Germanic studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
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