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Well, "legal" and "allowed in the sport" are two different concepts. Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland. It's just the US th

Well, "legal" and "allowed in the sport" are two different concepts. Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland. It's just the US that criminalizes them, and probably has influenced the decision to ban them outright. Regulation is another thing. I'd actually say they are regulated, in that the current rule is "don't take them". And even enforcing that relatively simple rule - just detect them, is actually a hard problem we can't solve very well, given the amount of athletes that lost medals over the last couple of olympics. In the end, PED regulation is just another set of rules added to each sport. These are professional athletes, and most manage to not run into any problems understanding and following the rules. Adding some kind of "permitted level of use" is theoretically possible, but I suspect you'll just end up spending a lot more money trying to detect how much anyone is using at a particular period of time, etc. etc. Add stupid political pressure from the US federal government, and I'd imagine any kind of "lenient system" would just be far, far more expensive to execute.

lossolo 9y ago
> Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland This is not entirely true. You will not be penalized for possessing anabolic steroids in Poland but selling without prescription is illegal. So without prescription the only way to get them is black market and there are tons of fakes on black market. So you don't really know what you are buying..
- burger_moon 9y ago
  There's also testing kits you can buy and most of these markets the customers are posting results of the tests and blood work to verify the source is legitimate. It's actually a quite reliable and honest economy because of how much scrutiny people have over putting vials of oil in their bodies. It's an interesting market dynamic considering it's completely unregulated and illegitimate.
- mr_tristan 9y ago
  The point is that the athlete isn't considered a criminal for possessing them in Poland, whereas in the US, they are.
taneq 9y ago
To further muddy the waters, in the context of sports, "legal" generally means "allowed in the sport", not just "non-criminal".

lossolo 9y ago

> Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland This is not entirely true. You will not be penalized for possessing anabolic steroids in Poland but selling without prescription is illegal. So without prescription the only way to get them is black market and there are tons of fakes on black market. So you don't really know what you are buying..

burger_moon 9y ago
There's also testing kits you can buy and most of these markets the customers are posting results of the tests and blood work to verify the source is legitimate. It's actually a quite reliable and honest economy because of how much scrutiny people have over putting vials of oil in their bodies. It's an interesting market dynamic considering it's completely unregulated and illegitimate.
mr_tristan 9y ago
The point is that the athlete isn't considered a criminal for possessing them in Poland, whereas in the US, they are.

taneq 9y ago

To further muddy the waters, in the context of sports, "legal" generally means "allowed in the sport", not just "non-criminal".