'Muscle Profiling': Anti-doping policy and deviant leisure

Abstract

Doping in sport has become progressively viewed as a social problem and a number of actors have been successively identified as the ‘carriers of this social harm’ (Ellis, 1987; in DeKeseredy & Dragiewicz, 2012). As a result the list of ‘folk devils’ (Cohen, 1985) has grown and so too have the control mechanisms employed to combat them. Performance and Image Enhancing Drugs (PIED) are deemed morally reprehensible by the general population, and considered a practice that should be banned and criminalized (Coomber, 2013; Coakley, 2014). However, there seems to be a tendency amongst policy makers to frame steroid or PIED use outside of elite sport as an issue within sport, and to call for the same types of policies that are being used in anti-doping (Kimergard, 2014). This paper will briefly explore the PIED policies of three countries, Sweden, Belgium and Denmark, highlighting the ways in which anti-doping in elite sport is informing national drug policy and encouraging a zero tolerance approach to PIEDs as a social health issue.