The "Enhanced Games": A Dangerous Human Experiment

"Imagine if Olympic athletes could take any drug they like.  Let's see how fast a human being can really run."  Ideas like this aren't new, though they usually turn up in late night stand up routines or forums for "crazy ideas".  

Not anymore.

Enter the Enhanced Games: a 2026 event sponsored by Aron D'Souza featuring athletes ranging from former Olympians to those banned from their sport currently.  What makes this different than the regular Olympics?  Oh, just the fact that the athletes will be drugged to the gills on any performance enhancing drug (PED) they can get their shady doctors to prescribe.  This can include anabolic steroids, stimulants like Adderall or Ritalin and human growth hormone to name a few.  Basically, if it's legal with a Rx in the States, they can have it in their system while competing.  Terms like "superhumanity" and other superlatives are being thrown around, though I see this going another direction entirely.  

The Enhanced Games are to be held in Las Vegas, which is hot and dry in the coolest of months but can reach temperatures of 115+ during the summer.  Say one of these doped-up athletes drops dead on the track (or elsewhere) while cameras roll.  Do you honestly think their loved ones aren't going to sue these sleazebags under the table?  That the U.S. media aren't going to turn the games' organizers into the next "Ketamine Queen" or Conrad Murray and use it as an excuse to go after the athletes' prescribing doctors? 

If there's one thing we value in this country, it's athletes--even drug-addled & poorly behaved ones.  Just look at the havoc that ensued when newly drafted NBA star Len Bias died (and his death wasn't even televised!)  His untimely overdose death was used to justify the escalation of the drug war in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan and the creation of the absurdly racist 100:1 crack to cocaine sentencing disparity that put (often Black) people in possession of crack cocaine away for decades while giving those in possession of large amounts of pure cocaine a slap on the wrist.  The only difference between the drugs being the addition of baking soda and water to crack.  Turns out Len Bias didn't even use crack--the media made that (racist) assumption and ran with it as an excuse to enact more (racist) drug laws, but the damage had been done.

Or say a hardcore underage fan of the games decides to replicate his favorite athlete's "stack" without a doctor's supervision.  He keels over while playing Call of Duty; now his grieving (negligent) parents want justice.  Yeah, we've all seen this movie before. 




History Repeats

"Enhanced" female athlete trains in the hot Abu Dhabi sun

This is actually one of the most dangerous ways to use drugs, medical supervision or not.  The whole thing is being run like a human experiment, with doctors in Abu Dhabi of all places observing the athletes closely as they train and fill themselves with more dope than a CIA plane bound for Mena, Arkansas in 1980s.  What exactly are they hoping to "learn" from this realtime unethical experiment?  That performance enhancing drugs (gasp) enhance performance?  We've already lost athletes to the abuse of these substances: Flo Jo being the first that comes to mind.  Florence Joyner, affectionately nicknamed "Flo Jo," was the picture of physical fitness and an American hero in track and field who competed at the height of the steroid abuse boom in 1988.  She started off as a mediocre athlete with a so-so physique before returning looking like a brick house & winning tons of medals for the U.S. in Seoul.   

Despite never testing positive for banned substances, her teammate Darrell Robinson as well as fellow athlete Carl Lewis claimed she indeed used PEDs; specifically human growth hormone.  When it was announced that random year-round drug testing would be implemented for Olympic athletes, Joyner promptly retired.  Her untimely death at age 38 was attributed officially to seizures and positional asphyxia caused by malformed blood vessels in the brain (cavernous hemangioma), but to this day people mentally connect her demise to the alleged use of these drugs.

There is a more well-documented case of an athlete dropping dead directly as a result of PED use.  At the 1960 Rome games, Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen began feeling "dizzy" and was sprayed with water by a teammate.  After a brief improvement, he fainted and hit his head on the concrete, fracturing his skull and later dying in hospital.  Autopsy reports both claimed that "no drugs were present" and that traces of amphetamine and "a few other things" were found.  Later it was leaked that he died due to severe heatstroke induced by a drug called Roniacol, a vasodilator administered by the team's coach.  

Then there was the death of baseball player Steve Bechler in 2003 which happened in a similar fashion.  While engaging in strenuous activity on the baseball field during a Spring training activity, Bechler dropped dead.  Like Jensen, Bechler suffered a heat stroke, though his was brought on by a combination of hard exercise, high temperatures and the herbal supplement ephedra, which was banned shortly following his high-profile demise.  Ephedra is an amphetamine-like stimulant that increases heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature and it used to be widely available in numerous forms over-the-counter at truck stops and other places the way kratom and vape juice is sold now.  Hundreds of serious injuries (strokes, heart attacks) and deaths had already happened in ephedra users, but it took a D-list athlete's death to get it banned.
 



Real Health vs. A Healthy Aesthetic

Juiced swimmer Ben Proud

Even if no athlete drops dead DURING the games, we already know the long-term health risks of abusing anabolic steroids and other such drugs.  There's no need whatsoever for additional testing, let alone in actual living humans.  Take a look at the long list of premature deaths in the WWE and WCW, for instance.  This is in fact one of the most dangerous ways to use drugs, and it's being passed off as a scientifically sound practice carried out with modern medicine's stamp of approval.  In no universe will this not encourage substance abuse/PED abuse in young people and aspiring athletes.  While these drugs are strictly forbidden at the Olympic Games, the same is not true of local bodybuilding competitions, college sports and high school athletics, which may technically carry out drug testing but rarely if ever apply it to every athlete all the time.  

This is just a more high-profile version of the shit "looksmaxxing" proponents like Clavicular engage in, mixing random substances together for the stated purpose of maximizing one's natural potential.  (Clavicular recently suffered a drug overdose during a livestream and has been accused of injecting a female coworker with drugs, which tells you everything you need to know about how "legit" this practice isn't).  It's a faux-scientific justification for drug abuse; making the unhealthy appear healthy by wrapping it in fitness and athletic performance jargon, yet it's no better for you than lying in the sun covered in baby oil surrounded by mirrors to obtain that "healthy glow". 

Just because something LOOKS healthy doesn't mean it is.  Drugs like meth and MDMA subjectively feel amazing, yet they're neurotoxic & hard on the heart.  You can look buff, fit and vital like weightlifter Bostin Loyd and drop dead in the gym before your 30th birthday due to PED abuse or develop Stage 3 testicular cancer like Lance Armstrong, who only realized he was sick when he began coughing up blood due to the cancer reaching his lungs (and brain).

There are thousands and maybe even millions of people who rely on stimulant medications & hormone replacement therapies to get out of bed and function every morning, and their ability to obtain these much-needed medications is being hampered by exactly this kind of behavior.  These athletes "need" these drugs like I need a hole in the head.  You can't scold college students and exhausted workers for using Adderall off-label to stay awake and work harder while handing out the same drug to elite athletes for the sole purpose of making them run faster & jump higher.  Even the name:  "Enhanced Games," makes it sound like PEDs can turn a mediocre athlete into a superathlete... that fucking with these drugs somehow makes a person athletically superior.  As in, "we're not just good, we're enhanced."  We already have a major problem with teenage boys abusing grey-market "SARMs" and peptides obtained online--why tf would anyone think this was a good idea?

In a country that makes you sign for decongestant tablets (Sudafed) and where diarrhea pills were nearly banned, this sideshow looks especially offensive.  Do our drug laws only apply to non-athletes & their doctors?  Mifepristone, a safe and effective at-home abortion medication that's also used in treating miscarriages, was just banned entirely in my state.  Kratom, a plant-based supplement used for millennia in Indonesia, is being referred to as "gas station heroin" by the mainstream media and politicians, yet this same draconian country is hosting the Enhanced-fucking-Games?  Make it make sense.   

You can't because our drug laws are nonsensical and their application totally arbitrary.  

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