Word: use
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...almost every sport, there are some pills and potions that promise black- magic results. To fire their systems up, many competitors have turned to stimulants, using amphetamines or even caffeine enemas and suppositories, because rectal administration puts the chemical into the bloodstream without causing an upset stomach. Testing for "uppers" by sports federations is highly reliable, but use of this class of drugs is not confined to competitions like the Olympics. Some of the most famous cases of stimulant usage have occurred in professional baseball and football, which have lax testing for the substances...
Diuretics are yet another group of forbidden drugs. The Bulgarian weight- lifting team was withdrawn from Seoul after two of its medalists tested positive for the diuretic furosemide. By flushing water from the body, these drugs help athletes reduce weight to compete in a particular class. They are also useful as masking agents, since along with the water, evidence of other drug use is eliminated...
They are the class of drugs that mimic the effect of testosterone in the body, and they are by far the most widely used performance-enhancing agents in sports. Among other things, testosterone causes the development of male secondary sexual characteristics -- facial hair, deep voice and muscle building -- and it is to promote the last that the use of steroids has become popular and, in such sports as weight lifting and field events, ubiquitous...
Steroids provide legitimate treatment for certain hormonal and blood disorders, among others, but they have also been put to other ends for decades. Developed in the 1930s, they had their first known non-medicinal use not long after -- by Nazi doctors who gave them to soldiers in the hope of enhancing their aggressiveness in battle. After World War II, Soviet sports officials reportedly noted the Nazis' use, and in the 1950s began giving steroids to athletes. U.S. doctors found out about this and introduced them to American athletes, initiating a kind of chemical cold...
...rather allow the body to bulk up with training beyond the degree possible with natural levels of testosterone. Or so it is thought. Their actual value is hotly disputed, in part because there are few large-scale studies. Athletes take the steroids in doses much larger than those used for therapeutic purposes, and doctors have been reluctant to conduct research that would in any way condone a practice they consider unhealthy. Athletes have fewer doubts. Dr. Forest Tennant, a California researcher, estimated in the New England Journal of Medicine that "as many as 1 million athletes" in the U.S. alone...