Is it all related to long term side-effects where the sports organization is attempting to keep the athletes safe down the line, or is there a hard line from a scientific standpoint where a drug goes from legal to illegal in the eyes of an organization like the IOC, and if so what’s the line?
In: Biology
Lawyer. From our perspective, the distinction is legal in nature. I’m a little biased but there is no scientific definition of a PED. It’s a category of substances which could include anything. It’s a legal distinction (maybe I should say legalistic) in the sense that regulating substances and activities, and substances in activities, requires a certain balance between precision in a rules applicability but generality with respect to subject matter. So when you see phrases like “precision enhancing drug” that is a considered attempt to create a phrase that captures some substances but not others. For example if you were to ban all “pills,” an athlete could get bounced for taking aspirin. But if you ban all “liquid injectible angrogenic compounds blah blah blah” you’ve effectively taken one PED out of the race but the law permits identical if differently composed substances. So you land in the middle with mealy mouthed dogshit like PED, which means not quite everything but also nothing. The point is to leave some wiggle room over what can be banned because drugs evolve and new ones come out all the time. The rule stays the same and it’s application is subject to human judgment over what constitutes a PED, which I think is a better way to do things that to try and change the law every time a new compound makes its way out of some former soviet chem lab. If you want to see how well that approach works take a look at the US Code’s attempts to keep up with designer drug analogues.
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