Drug Policy in Sport: On the Genealogy of the Immoral Status of Anabolic -Androgenic Steroids. A Polemic.

This research has endeavored to establish that the normalized deviant judgment ascribed to athletes caught using performance-enhancing substances in professional sports organizations is upheld only by virtue of a fallacious assumption; that a breach of the Athletes Professional Code of Conduct is equitable with a breach of both the ethos of our society and of Western professional sports organizations’ “spirit of competition”. The significance of this distortion is recognized in relation to the way professional sports organizations enforce these policies through disciplinary measures that are subjected on docile athletes – effectively measuring and judging athlete’s drug-related choices through appeal to an ideology based on an outdated and pseudo-scientific narrative. It has therefore been my intention to, through a deconstruction of the narrative, distinguish how these athletes have not so objectively disregarded the ethos of the organizations they compete in but rather that they have acted in accordance with the latent ethos of professional sports organization in contemporary Western society and have then been judged, and punished upon their violation of the misguided manifest policies. Working from this premise I have conducted a theoretical analysis of why athletes passively accept their exploitation, and developed policy diagnoses for the organizations in question.