Leading Australian Swimming coach Don Talbot, once a leading advocate against drugs in sport appears to have turned. He is not alone though. Even former IOC head Juan Samaranch said back in 1998 that drugs should be legalised if they were not harming athletes.

Others weighing in include Mike Agostini, former Olympic sprinter and the world's fastest man in 1954 and now an Aussie, and Australian-born Oxford University Professor of Ethics Julian Savulescu have also taken the legalised position. It is almost ironic that such prominent Australians have taken this position when generally, as a society, Australians despise drugs in sport.

If you think that the playing field is already uneven then don’t think that by legalising drugs it will ever change this. This is just plain delusional. For starters, who would make the call to allow drugs to be used in sport? Governments would have to change policy, police and the courts would have to change laws, sports authorities would have to rip up the drug rules, health authorities, including doctors, would have to change job descriptions, and sports institutes would be transformed into doping institutes. And so many other questions to ponder.

'If you think that the playing field is already uneven then don’t think that by legalising drugs it will ever change this. This is just plain delusional'


• What drugs would be allowed?
• Would every athlete have equal access to all drugs?
• Who and how would drug taking be ‘medically’ supervised?
• Who and how would it be determined that a drug was performance enhancing but not dangerous?
• Would age limits be imposed?
• Could doctors be sued because the athlete didn’t win despite taking performance enhancing drugs?
• Could doctors be sued for making an athlete sick because taking performance enhancing drugs were not meant to make anyone sick?

Why the hell should doctors be asked to turn the Hippocratic oath upside down by giving medicines (because that’s what drugs are apart from the odd designer steroid) to ‘healthy’ athletes. Aren’t doctors supposed make sick people better, not the other way around, because what one drug may benefit an athlete may harm or kill another.

And by allowing doctors to become an integral rather than peripheral part of the sporting enterprise and therefore open to a ‘cut’ of the winnings, the temptation to ‘pump’ athletes full of drugs to win rather than to get the best performance out of them would be inviting. What would be the chances of many athletes ending up on the scrap heap because their drug dosages were not controlled but manipulated?

For example, I pose the scenario that if it was deemed that all athletes could take the blood booster EPO and that a level of 50 percent was regarded as the legal limit. Some athletes are naturally near, or at, this limit anyway and others could be as low as 35 – 40. They will require very different dosages and for the athlete at the lower level they are going to have to take and awful lot of EPO to get to the legal limit. So much so, that it could kill them, and plenty have already.

More than 30 athletes have died since 1987 allegedly from taking too much EPO. And for those near the level naturally, they could dose up to levels of 55-60 percent and then simply infuse a saline solution to falsely reduce it to 50 or below. It may appear that legalised doping could be controlled and not be harmful but in reality nothing will change and that manipulation can, and will, probably still happen. It's human nature.

Worst of all, the sporting world would be plunged back to the dark days of institutional doping so infamously perpetrated by the East Germans which saw a plethora of mutations, perhaps even deaths, let alone the massive sporting fraud on the rest of the world.

To cap it all off though, young athletes would be recruited on the basis that they are not only talented but also because they would be willing to take drugs to get to the top. As parents we all try to encourage our kids to say no to drugs. If drugs were legalised in sport we as parents (and the kids) would have no choice in the matter. Surely this is an untenable and unacceptable scenario and a blight on us all if it ever came to pass.

While the current system has its flaws the alternative will only make the situation worse.

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