Creating fear: The social construction of human Growth Hormone as a dangerous doping drug

Abstract

This article examines how the lay press and the expert literature have contributed to spreading the bad image of human Growth Hormone as a doping drug despite the lack of a solid scientific grounds proving its alleged deleterious side-effects. The analysis of the press coverage shows that the drug has been associated with a number of negative concepts and mainly with several health hazards and even (indirectly) with death, through the insistence on the fact that it used to be extracted from cadavers prior to 1985. The expert literature review unveils that a vast majority of the claims about the negative side-effects of the drug contained in the reviewed articles and book chapters are actually suppositions or deductions, not based in actual empirical research. The story about the use of cadaveric hGH is also lavishly quoted by the expert literature. The true available scientific evidence points only to mild side-effects of hGH supplementation in healthy adults. It is therefore concluded that this discourse can be labelled as ideological rather than factual or scientific. These claims have become common sense or naturalized knowledge, and have ultimately become instrumental in the anti-doping campaign succeeding in imposing its perspective on doping and its radical recipes to eradicate it.