Towards a Social Science of Drugs in Sport by Jason Mazanov

Author:Jason Mazanov [Mazanov, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415853149
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 17270235
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Creating a system of regulation internal to sports

The question then arises as to what such an institutional structure looks like in the context of the regulation of drugs in sport. Fortunately, we know what such a structure looks like as it already exists in multifarious forms. Sports naturally attempt to secure the gains of ‘law enforcement’ by establishing peak bodies that determine relevant codes of ethics, fix the punishments for the breaches of those codes, and investigate reported abusive behaviour within the various sports (e.g. NADOs, WADA, SGBs, NFs, IFs, etc). Each peak body has an incentive to encourage players to report drug usage since doing so increases the regard in which the sport is held (subject to a caveat which is discussed below), and, thereby, increases the sport's aggregate purse (assuming that spectators prefer to watch ‘drug-free’ rather than ‘drug-affected’ contests). Players themselves then have an incentive to report usage too since the costs of investigating and sustaining credible complaints against co-sportspeople are spread over the whole corps of athletes in the sport. Reporting players will also obtain a ‘windfall’ gain from the elimination of players credibly ‘convicted’ of drug usage since their chances of winning contests will have improved.8 Of course, this system of reporting creates an incentive to accuse co-sportsmen falsely in order to secure the windfall gain. To counter this consequence of relying on peer reportage, the making of complaints that are not based on adequate prima facie evidence may be punished on the grounds of their being vexatious, as is standard practice in legal codes.

The advantages of such a system of invigilation are threefold. First, by operating through the influence of the regard or esteem in which the sport is held by the (paying) public, the incentives to report drug usage are more closely aligned with the interests of the spectating public than is the case for bureaucracies. This is so because it only pays a peak body to proscribe and investigate drug usage that the public is concerned about, rather than the ingestion of every single performance-enhancing chemical compound (and, as we've mentioned earlier, the sports regulation bureaucracy has an inherent incentive to extend proscription beyond the scope of public interest — see the reference to the Niskanen paper). To that extent, society's attitudes to the costs and benefits of drug usage might be better reflected in the ethical codes of practice that are enforced by peak bodies than they are in the regulations of external government agencies. Second, since players might generally be expected to be better informed about doping practices than external agencies, the discovery of such behaviour ought generally to be better once players are incentivized to report such usage. Players will be incentivized to abate drug usage in ways that bureaucrats are not if they are cognizant of the net benefits to the sport (and therefore to themselves) of their doing so. This is to say that athletes will be motivated to report drug cheats if they can see that public support and monetary demand for the sport is increased if the sport is clean.

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