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Comment by UweSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to take a drug to improve my performance while having to monitor for side effects, deal with withdrawal and worry about potential and unknown long term damage.

In particular I don't want to feel like I would have to take a drug just to keep up with everyone else who is on gear. That's how it seems to be in professional sports, but that's a niche. Brain drugs would be attractive to a large part of society.

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This is how I felt as a kid on ADHD medicine, except for the "keep up with everyone else who is on gear" part. Instead it's "to conform with the traditional notion of how a student should behave".

It's really horrifying that they already give these types of drugs to elementary school children, none of whom are capable of weighing the pros and cons.

This is one of the main reasons I like watching soccer. The smallest dude can dominate the world and it doesn't feel like I'm watching people destroy their health for a chance at making it big.

Soccer players still ‘benefit’ from drug use. A much larger issue was largely ignored by professional bodies. FIFA still only has a 2 year ban for someone caught, and does not try that hard to find users.

According to a statement of one of UK Sport's Independent Sampling Officers (ISO), "If a club knows in advance we're coming, and the club suspects one of their players, they keep him off training and his name doesn't appear on the list I am given." In the 1999–2000 season, testers were present at just 32 of the over 3,500 league matches, taking samples from two players of each side. Compared to other sports in the UK, like cricket, cycling or athletics, footballers are far less likely to be tested.[13] A case of high-profile was the one of Rio Ferdinand, who missed a drug test in September 2003 and found himself punished for it, being banned for eight months.[14] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_association_footba...

I think any sport that is more like an art is gonna be like that. Soccer is more of an art. There are positions where the performance enhancing drugs definitely will help you. (And I'm sure a lot of players use those drugs if they are at those positions.) But you won't become Pogba, Messi, or Neymar by shooting up. Those guys are artists.

Basketball is like that too. Shoot up with whatever you like, it will have no effect on your 3 point percentage. You want to shoot like Steph Curry? Then you'll need to be just as good an artist. You want to handle the ball as well as Kyrie Irving? You'll have to be just as good an artist.

I know people might disagree with this one, but I think some hockey positions are like that. People should try this experiment, go to your local ice rink, and try weaving through traffic at top speed on skates and putting the puck in that 6 inch window that a keeper might give you to the back of the net. Steroids aren't gonna help with that.

Those are all sports where a little guy can come in and just dominate through sheer asymmetry of skill. It's a beautiful thing to watch.

The drugs enable more time spent practicing.

PEDs can help with the things you describe because they allow you to train significantly longer and more frequently because you recover far better/faster.

I once worked with a professional cyclist. His attitude about PEDs were largely similar to yours: less about increasing your maximum ability and more that they allowed for better recovery between training/racing sessions. This is anecdotal, of course. No idea if it’s true.

There absolutely are PEDs that increase your maximum ability when it comes to endurance sports, like EPO. A reporter tried microdosing EPO (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-32983932) and experienced a 7% increase in maximum performance in 7 weeks.

for the basketball and hockey arguments you made...i'm fairly certain things like stimulants can be and are used to help maintain focus during practice. 3 point shooting is a boring mechanical repetitive motion. Doing that motion 1000 times a day is boring. Taking a stim might allow you to continue to focus and get the reps in that will allow you to perform the motion better. Taking the right drugs might allow you to avoid injury and reduce fatigue.

My favourite "conspiracy theory" is that PEDs are rampant in football/soccer. It's not a high profile issue because those in charge of running the sport don't want to look under the carpet for fear of what might be there.

> Soccer is more of an art.

True, skill is paramount versus other more physical sports, but the main purpose of PEDs is to recover from injury not to bulk up or make guys bigger or stronger.

Interestingly, Messi was given HGH before reaching adulthood in order to overcome a growth hormone disorder[1] (completely legal). Without HGH it's unlikely he'd be half the player he is.

Pep Guardiola tested positive for a banned substance during his playing career, although he was later exonerated.

Arsene Wenger has publicly stated in the past that he reckons the sport is full of drug cheats.[2]

Operation Puerto in Spain[3] involved a lot of blood samples, including those from footballers, being destroyed. Around that time, Barcelona and the Spanish national team were absolutely ripping it up.

There was a doctor filmed in the UK[4] who allegedly supplied Arsenal, Chelsea and Leicester City with PEDs. Leicester went from relegation fodder in 2014-2015 (bottom of the league for quite some time), to winning the premier league in 2015-2016 season. They were 5000-1 odds to win the league, played a high intensity counter attacking football, with more or less the same 11 every week.

I wouldn't swear in court that any of the above examples are definitely doping, but it's incredible that none of this is seriously being investigated.

[1] https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1492546-lionel-messi-and...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/nov/14/footba...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operaci%C3%B3n_Puerto_doping_c...

[4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/03/cyclist-at-centr...

Plenty of doping and cheating in soccer.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/feb/08/arsenal-ars...

The problem is that soccer/FIFA is so lucrative and corrupt that there is very little testing or it's simply ignored.

This competition is already the case with amphetamines. They are not necessary but IMO they do provide a productivity benefit over those who do not take, on average.

It's an acute benefit though, isn't it? I've noticed that people coming down off of amphetamines are not as productive as they might otherwise be.

Do you know of an acute performance-enhancing/experience-enhancing drug that doesn't have a shitty come-down phase?

That's true, but meth mouth is a particularly shitty side effect.

They could beat you in their productive phase and suffer while coming down. Lose-lose.

Probably, it'd be hard to say for sure. I personally don't take it every day and sometimes just take half of my dosage, to reduce tolerance. There definitely is a tolerance though and also a bit of Yerkes-Dodson law type deal at play, e.g. if I take to much I am also not productive.

I would definitely say it increases my productivity output though overall.

Correctly dosed and this isn’t an issue

People already take adderall to pass exams and to do well at work. Some people do their best work drunk or after smoking pot. Some people even microdose psychadelics (and in biology, we wouldn’t have PCR if it weren’t for a fateful acid trip).

People take these performance enhancers because they work. The only thing stopping everyone from taking their gramme of soma a day is cost, access, and a willingness to experiment. Sometimes I wonder what could be achieved if we lowered these barriers we’ve put up based on antiquated views of moral character. Imagine if Einstein met Hoffman!

> In particular I don't want to feel like I would have to take a drug just to keep up with everyone else who is on gear.

That's what I do to deal with my ADD. Adderall has some obnoxious side effects. And also: that's why I wear a CPAP every night, and believe me wearing a mask every single night is annoying as hell.

So on one hand, I get you—it'd be nice to not have to do these things just to get back to baseline. But on the other, I'm glad I have the option to do so, and I do them knowing the side effects, because it's worth it.

"That's how it seems to be in professional sports, but that's a niche."

That niche is a bigger than you realize. One of the 'benefits' of amphetimine is productivity. Many meth abusers use it before work for this reason. Both physical and mental effort can be sustained for much longer periods.

'm pretty sure physical enhancers would be more attractive to the general population than mental enhancers, although the HN community probably varies on this issue.

It depends on what you mean by “physical enhancers” and “mental enhancers” - my understanding is that stimulants are already much more widely used than steroids. I certainly agree that some theoretical physically enhancing drugs would be more popular than some theoretic mentally enhancing drugs.

A physical enhancer enhances some physical aspect predominantly, and a mental enhancer enhances some mental aspect predominantly or allows you to do better at enhancing the particular aspect yourself.

physical enhancers I can think of: Steroids, Viagra

mental enhancers I can think of: Modafinal (and similar, mainly, can also argue it is a physical enhancer), psychological drugs focused on better focus etc.

half and half - amphetamines. you can stay up to study but you don't pay attention so you could also stay up to party.

physical enhancers I can think of offhand: drug makes you beautiful, drug makes you physically tough, sharpshooter drug etc. etc.

mental enhancers I can think of: increase short term memory, photographic memory, increase reading speed, language processing improvements.

I guess I see that passing the GED drug mentioned in the other comment but intelligence is as a general rule not something people aspire to in this society (IMHO) therefore I would expect intelligence altering drugs would not receive as much funding as drugs that effect the things that society values, and those things tend to be physical.

Or to paraphrase Idiocracy the best minds would be devoted to enlarging penis size not making people smarter.

I don't know man?

Where I'm from out here in flyover country there are an awful lot of people stuck in dead end jobs that would literally jump at a drug like that if its effect was dramatic enough.

Getting that GED in a weekend? You better believe there are a lot of people out here in trailer park and opioid land who would be all over that. Doesn't mean much to us, but the GED opens up raises at their current jobs, and even jobs that they currently are not able to get. That's not even counting the waitress types trying to get through college at night without waking up their kid. Those single mom types would definitely take it. It wouldn't even be a question for them.

Only way an illicit drug like that would not be consumed around where I live, is if the people around here couldn't find out about it. (Even that though would be hard, because I'm sure we have drug dealers around here who are probably pretty good at marketing stuff like that.)

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