What differentiates a performance enhancing drug (PED) from other things such that an athlete takes to train such as vitamin pills? What differentiates them to make them banned substances while others are not?

Question

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

Answer 1

Taking a vitamin supplement is just bolstering your nutritional intake. You still have to do the work of going to the gym and working out to gain muscle mass and improve your performance.

Taking a performance enhancing drug that affects your hormones is different. It affects the actual brain chemistry and alters your internal biology, allowing the drug to do some of the work that normally takes an athlete effort, time, commitment, and literal sweat and hard work to accomplish.

The legality of drugs is generally related to whether or not taking them gives the athlete a performance advantage over someone who was physically equivalent, and put in the same effort, but didn’t take the drug. The most commonly referred to PED is of course steroids, because they actually alter the levels of testosterone in the blood and stimulate muscle tissue in the body to grow larger and stronger.