Essay --

Hundreds of professional athletes across the world have been accused of taking performance enhancing drugs. The use of performance-enhancing drugs by professional athletes, or "doping", has been acknowledged as a problem since at least the 1960s. The first use of performance-enhancing drugs has been traced back to the first Olympics in Greece. Scandinavian mythology says Berserkers could drink a concoction prepared from a mushroom, to increase their physical power a dozen times. â€Å"We have to make some radical move to get the attention of everyone. Cheaters can't win and steroids have put us in the position that it's OK to cheat.† (Lou Brock, 2009) This quote describes how almost every professional player feels when they know that their opponents are cheating. Performance enhancing drugs should be banned and players should be punished more harshly because it leads to numerous diseases, young athletes would be tempted to take it, and players would be unpredictable and can ca use. Performance enhancing drugs are known to cause numerous diseases such as tumors, cancer, and can cause fertility problems. There are numerous cases of players dying or ruining their careers because they have gotten caught up in getting bigger and taking these drugs For instance in professional wrestling alone, 28 people have died because of PED’s (All of these people are died younger than 45 years old.) (wrestlinginc.com, 2010). There are hundreds of known PED’s. The most commonly used drug is steroids which gives you an increased risk of heart and liver disease. Players use this drug because it makes you have better endurance, it makes your blood flow faster and it makes you stronger. Another popular PED is Human Growth Hormone. This drug has been and still ... ...t these drugs are catastrophic and cause so many diseases and sicknesses that should not happen to an athlete. Athletes will be looked at as superheroes and children would not want to idolize a player that got to where he is because he did drugs. A child wants to look up to a player that beat the odds and worked harder than everyone else. If Performance Enhancing Drugs were legalized and allowed in all professional sports, there would be a lot of deaths, and player that have diseases caused by the drugs they took. Also High school and college players would begin to take it because they would feel like that is the only way to get to the pros. And lastly players would hurt themselves and their teammates and fellow players. PED’s have a lot of potential but not yet. There are too many health defects and we do not want our â€Å"heroes† to die from a disease caused by drugs.