Growing up, I had two associations with the word drug: one was with the medicine doctors prescribed to fight my chronic ear infections, bouts of flu, and childhood ailments, and the other was with illegal drugs–meth, cocaine, and heroine.
I always knew the purpose of pharmaceuticals like Tylenol or Claritin. They were there to fix me, or as we’ve been discussing in class, “bring me up to the norm.” The purpose of illegal drugs was not so clear. Were they social? Were they fun? I couldn’t imagine those being strong enough reasons to risk an overdose. It never occurred to me that illegal drugs are actually performance enhancing. They push user experiences beyond normal human capability, and that is the reason people take them.
Not to say that I advocate illegal drug use. It’s usually addictive, it’s dangerous, and we can demonstrate the ways it has ruined lives. But not all performance enhancing drugs are meth, cocaine, and heroine. Some cognitive enhancing drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall are widely prescribed (note that these applications don’t enhance the taker, but bring them to normality.)
It seems strange to me that when we talk about alleviating a problem, most people, especially Americans, advocate the use of drugs. But as soon as the same drugs are used for enhancement, we worry about the dangers, we worry about fairness, and we start calling “foul” in droves.
Take for instance, cycling.
Professional cycling has one of the worst, if not the worst, rates of doping. There are two main concerns with doping: one of fairness because less talented cyclists could be winning races over their more talented peers, and one of safety because it is illegal to study the effects of the drugs they’re doping with (at least at the levels and combinations they’re doping in). But doping also raises questions about why it raises questions at all. Is there something inherent in enhancements that make us nervous? Or is it because, like me, we were raised to associate all drugs with the danger of some?
Alva Noe, a philosophy professor at UC Berkeley, argues that if all athletes are expected to dope, and their doping is regulated the way the weights of their bikes is, then doping is no different than any other enhancement. By enhancement he means enhancing equipment: superior bikes, sweat absorbing shorts, and helmets. The point being, if we could control the risks to health and fairness, doping would no longer be a problem.
Removing the two main concerns doesn’t solve the problem with enhancement, though. There seems to be a stigma against enhancing drugs specifically, that goes beyond our normal guidelines for what is fair and safe.