WE THINK PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING DRUGS ARE OK -- EXCEPT IN SPORTS

LONDON

Junkies probably are not too keen on international conferences, but there's
one coming up that's set to be a cracker.

Drug-users the world over -- everyone from teen-agers on Ecstasy to
middle-aged men on Viagra along with the anxious millions on Prozac --
should be clearing their diaries and booking their tickets for Lausanne,
Switzerland, where next January the International Olympic Committee will
gather to debate the prickly business of drugs in sport.

The average pill-popper may reckon this has nothing to do with him, but he'd
be wrong. The IOC's deliberations have a relevance that goes far beyond the
cyclists, sprinters and swimmers at the center of the usual rows about
doping. In fact, the debate over performance-enhancing drugs touches on a
confusion that affects all of us -- revealing a major shift in our attitude
not only to medicine but to the human body and soul.

That confusion has been on display all month. First, the Tour de France was
knocked off balance by a dope scandal, as a stash of illegal substances was
found in the hotel rooms of two of the leading teams. Then Olympic shot put
champion Randy Barnes failed a second drug test, as did sprinter Dennis
Mitchell -- both of them facing possible bans from their sports.

But it was IOC head Juan Antonio Samaranch who really set the debate on
fire. The Andrei Gromyko of international sport (he's been on the Olympics
governing body for 33 years) wondered whether his fellow athletics
chieftains shouldn't lighten up in their attitude to drug-taking. Perhaps
runners, lifters and hurdlers should be allowed to give themselves a little
pharmaceutical help, Samaranch suggested. He sought to distinguish
acceptable drug-taking from the unacceptable variety -- currently bundled
together.

"Doping now is everything that, firstly, is harmful to an athlete's health
and, secondly, artificially augments his performance," he said. Yet only the
first kind is actually dodgy. In other words, if pills make you run faster
and cause you no damage, said Samaranch, they're OK. Of course, he was
instantly condemned by the top brass of world sport, but has the IOC boss
got a point?

He certainly has realism on his side: Sporting drug-taking is now so
commonplace, it might well be time to accept it as an unavoidable fact of
athletic life. But Samaranch also zeroes in on a confusion we all have about
drugs and sport.

Science whiz Oliver Morton recently suggested splitting the Olympic Games
into two: one for those getting bottled help, another for those who were
drug-free. Fans could watch records tumble as pharmacologically enhanced
supermen and women competed in the Open Olympics, while nostalgists could
enjoy the slower pace of the Olympics Classic.

The response to the idea was fascinating: People disliked it, but they
weren't sure why. For some, the problem was ethical: Runners on drugs are
cheats, even if they openly admit what they're taking. Others said the
problem with pills is that they're not "natural" -- although they had no
objection to goalkeepers wearing contact lenses, even though those
artificial aids are hardly found in nature.

But the argument that really floors the traditionalists is the mention of
drugs outside sport. Surely Viagra is a performance-enhancer, in the most
literal sense of the term? If a man takes an artificial drug to boost his
physical prowess, how different is he from Ben Jonson or the TVM team in the
Tour de France?

And what about the hordes of men and women who rely on Prozac to lift them
out of depression? Many of them tell movingly how the little tablet enables
them to function more effectively than ever before -- to run the race of
life. Is that a performance-enhancer? It sounds like one.

There are differences, of course, but they are hardly compelling. One might
say that consumers of Viagra and Prozac are not in competition, unlike the
athletes gobbling up human growth hormone. And yet that is hardly clear.
Indeed, plenty of doctors suspect it's competition which is driving the
countless men who have besieged their offices, desperate to become more
enduring lovers thanks to a vial of Viagra.

Perhaps the difference is no wider than a doctor's prescription. In other
words, where there is a diagnosed medical problem, then drugs are all right.
Except that, once again, the demand for Viagra has not been fueled solely by
men with clinical impotence. Plenty of the new Viagrans are men who can do
it fine -- they just want to do it harder and longer. For them drugs are no
longer a cure, they are a lifestyle-enhancer.

Origin plays its part, too. Viagra and Prozac are deemed legitimate because
they were developed in well-funded labs by researchers in white coats;
Ecstasy, by contrast, is off-limits because it appears illicitly, bubbling
up from the streets. But that, too, hardly seems a satisfactory place to
draw the line.

The key point here is that the gap between acceptable and unacceptable drugs
is not as wide as we might hope. On the contrary, they have much in common.
Both reveal the current tendency toward the medicalization of human
activity, both its accomplishments and its problems.

Sport was once an arena for human excellence; in the brave new world
envisaged by Samaranch, it could become a contest not of athletic endeavor
but of bio-medical genius. Instead of Mark Richardson vs. Michael Johnson,
it could be Wellcome vs. Smith Kline Beecham.

Similarly, where sexual failure or mental turbulence was once a problem to
be addressed psychologically, with a search for emotional explanations, now
we reach for the quick fix of a pill. In life, as in sport, we are looking
for answers not in ourselves but at the pharmacy.

This might not be as bleak as it sounds. For what unites both the athletes
and the regular folks turning to drugs is a refusal to accept the limits on
human capability. Both the discus-thrower and the would-be lover believe
they can be better than their body tells them.

They are reaching for the stars, even if they have to stand on a pillbox to
get there -- and that, at least, is an impulse to cherish.

Checked-by: Don Beck