Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the Commission 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 today. His statement was prescient in that there is probably no other issue that is seen by either the general public or authorities in major sport organizations to be 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 anti-doping 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, 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. An intriguing aspect of the use of banned substances and methods in sport is the fact that, according ... log in or subscribe to read full text