Reform policies on drugs and censorship in sport!

Although I know that millions of people are passionate about their sports, whether as players or spectators, sport has never excited me very much, but every now and then a title interests me and I click through to read the article.

In the BBC Sports article "Leaked IAAF doping files: Wada 'very alarmed' by allegations" (2015), Dan Roan tells us that the initial response of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to a recent whistle blower revelation of shocking facts about the use of performance enhancing drugs in the sport was to try to censor the information being revealed by the news media that had seen it. Both the IAAF and the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) have since admitted the truth of the extent of drug use among top level athletes.

I had never heard of either Wada or the IAAF, and had to read the article carefully a couple of times to clear up what the acronym and set of initials stood for, although my first quick skimming of the article did confirm that it was worth reading properly. Nonetheless, had it not been on the front page of the BBC News website, I probably would not have seen it: I never click through to the BBC Sports section.

My first response was one that is similar to my ideas about drug use in society generally: the laws that make some drugs illegal, whilst most irrationally and unjustly leaving some drug use legal are the cause of much of the problems that come from drug use by individuals in society. Making marijuana and yaa baa illegal, for example, seems to be done only to benefit corrupt government officials and mafia groups: such laws certainly do not benefit any other group or help society generally, and I don't think that supporting corruption and mafia profits are good reasons for government policy. In the meantime, alcohol, which is at least as harmful as yaa baa and much more harmful to individuals and society is legal.

This seems both insane and totally immoral to me. And the same situation seems to exist in many (all?) sports. Players, especially at high levels, naturally want to win and to do their best. For these reasons, the train hard, they follow strict regimes in every area of their lives, which they largely devote to excellence in their chosen sport. It does not surprise that some (perhaps most?) top level sportsmen and women seek to also benefit from the use of drugs that improve performance. And I can't see any reason why this should not be accepted: current policy is obviously a failure, that only pushes sportswomen and men to be more dishonest and better at lying than their competitors. Are things like the Olympic Games really supposed to be contests in how well the participants can lie, deceive and trick? Perhaps one solution would be to have events where athletes are allowed to use whatever drugs they want, and other events for strictly natural players. I would be interested to see which proved the more attractive to spectators. Would sports fans choose the natural and relatively weaker players with only natural enhancements, or would they prefer the higher level performances of the drug enhanced players? I suspect the crowds would choose the better players.

The other thing that I thought of as I read the article was how similar the official response was to the ugly habit of politicians to unpleasant facts: try to censor and stop people learning the truth. I remember that former PM Thaksin loved to use the law courts to stop people discussing facts about him and his government that were not very good, and his sister Yingluck tried to use the law to stop the Thai press investigating and reporting on the rice pledging scheme and other embarrassing issues. Of course, the current Thai government, unelect and self-amnestied, is much worse than Thaksin and Pheuthai when it comes to using the law to block and conceal the truth from citizens: when a local newspaper in Phuket used information from the international Reuters news group to publish a story on possible human trafficking involvement by the Thai navy, they started a court case and had the editors arrested! Even worse is the large number of things that the Thai media cannot talk about today: this forced silence can only lead to ignorant and uninformed opinion on every censored topic.

We see the same in sports scandals: they shock fans because the ugly truth had long been suppressed so that sports lovers think people like Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong and other sporting heroes are wonderful role models of good people and the like. These high opinions are then proved false and unfounded when the truth does come out, and too often, instead of honestly admitting mistakes and worse, the guilty try to censor to silence reporting what is true. I can't think of anything that helps corruption and other abuses more than laws that protect people from the results of healthy free speech. Isn't it better to know that Lance Armstrong was a great cyclist because he used drugs, even as he lied that he was 100% natural? Isn't it better to know that Tiger Woods was unfaithful to his wife with lots of other women, that he seems a bit of a sex maniac, who again lied to make millions from advertising products using his clean and wonderful image?

Perhaps I should have a look at the sports section more often: it certainly stimulated lots of ideas this time.

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Reference

Roan, D. (2015, August 2). Leaked IAAF doping files: Wada 'very alarmed' by allegations. BBC Sport. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/athletics/33749208