Will doping kill us?

By: Alisa, Barney, Meagan, Romina, Virginia

doping index pcWhen you hear the word doping you might not think that it is related to the beauty industry or transhumanism, but it has mutable aspects where you can see the connection. Doping is a form of improving one’s self physically and mentally. But what does this have to do with beauty or transhumanism? In this article we will try to answer this question, focusing on doping in schools and in sports.

Well, a form of improvement is always connected to beauty, due to the fact that doping enhances the already given features of a person’s body, in order to fit into the beauty standards of our society. Nowadays both mind and body can be altered and therefore go above and beyond our natural state and limits and become more than human; this implies transhumanism.

According to the Merriam-Webster website ‘doping’ is: „the use of a substance (as an anabolic steroid or erythropoietin) or technique (as blood doping) to illegally improve athletic performance”. Some of these substances are for example Growth hormones; anabolic steroids, which enhance the force and the strength of the muscles; Amphetamine, which abolishes the need to sleep. This last mentioned form of doping is not just used as a party drug, but also used in schools and universities. The most taken amphettudying at nightamine is A.D.H.D. medicine. As a result we have addicted teens finishing high school and then being burdened by the side effects of these drugs for their whole life. These include physically changing the chemistry in the brain, says a Therapist at a Treatment center in Manhattan. Having heart irregularities, depression and mood swings are other negative side effects. Students use these drugs to work through the night, in order to reach higher grades. They are recommended and hyped in schools by students themselves. These stimulants are becoming the norm for teens all over the world, due to the constant pressure from our society.

The same thing happens in sports. If athletes want to achieve the same accomplishment as their rivals or even perform better, then they often boost their performance and their pain threshold, through doping. They used to ‘dope’ with alcohol, which decreases pain in athletes. The 60-70km/h finSCHWAZER_Alexales showed us superhuman achievements, which were very exciting for the people back then, but in the long term athletes felt the negative consequences of their actions. There are several examples that can be mentioned like the episodes of doping in the “Tour de France”, but also the scandal of the Italian race walker Alex Schwazer. He was the Olympic 50k walk champion but retired during the 2012 Olympics after being disqualified for doping offences.

Now, why do people, champions like him, ruin their life and career just to achieve results that they are not able to reach without help? This makes us think about human nature, which is composed by the impulses to become „more” than we are. And this is the reason why transhumanism surely will become more and more part of our everyday life. We are trying to become the perfect human, but by doing this we are pushing our bodies to the limit and therefore damaging it permanently.

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