Drugs/Substance Use in Sport

Abstract

In theCommission of Inquiry into the Use of Drugs and Banned Practices Intended to Increase Athletic Performance(Dubin, 1990), commissioned by the Canadian government in the aftermath of the infamous Ben Johnson drug scandal at the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympic Games, Chief Justice Charles Dubin stated that the problem of drug/substance use represented the single greatest moral crisis in high performance sport. His statement was prescient in that there is no other issue that is seen by either the general public or the authorities in major sport organizations as a greater threat to the integrity of international sport than the use of banned drugs/substances. Certainly no other issue warrants the same commitment of resources and bureaucratic effort, especially since the creation of the World Anti‐Doping Agency in 1999, which now oversees antidoping efforts worldwide. The problem of drug use in sport also presents for sociologists and those in related academic disciplines in sports studies an opportunity to study the deviant subculture of drug use and the social and political dynamics of modern sport, and even more generally to explore the sociology of deviant behavior and the social construction of “normal” and “pathological” categories in a major sphere of social life.