In USA Today, Maxwell Mehlman offers a defense of performance enhancing drugs. As Mehlman notes, most of the arguments offered against performance enhancing drugs just aren’t very compelling. Rather, the argument against PEDs is largely aesthetic,
This leads to an unavoidable conclusion: There is nothing inherently wrong with athletes using relatively safe drugs. People simply find it distasteful. It offends their aesthetic sensibilities.
Make no mistake: Aesthetics are important. Our sense of aesthetics is what allows us to distinguish what is beautiful from what is ugly. It drove XFL football out of existence. But people’s tastes differ. Some fans don’t seem to mind steroid use by professional baseball players, for example, as long as it lets the stars hit more home runs.
Tastes change, as perhaps they will when people realize that the ultimate justification for the policy against all drugs in sports is the same reason that we get upset when the neighbors paint their house purple.
I’m not sure they will change that much. There is one pseudo-athletic area where fans not only tolerate but seem to, by their behavior, encourage steroid use. That, of course, would be in wrestling outlet such as the WWE. Part of the appal of wrestling, as far as I can tell, is people want to see larger than life characters and having exagerrated almost comic book-like muscles adds to that effect (it also tends to kill wrestlers at relatively young ages).
But competitive athletics are a bit different. Part of the attraction of athletics is identifying with the athletes in a way that is very different from wrestling. The use of performance enhancing drugs detracts from that identification, and would, I suspect, make competitive sports less attractive to watch for many people.
Source:
What’s wrong with using drugs in sports? Nothing. Maxwell Mehlman, USA Today, August 11, 2004.