You don’t have to look far to find stories of professional athletes who suffer from some form of substance abuse. In some cases, athletes turn to performance enhancing drugs in a desperate attempt to give themselves a competitive advantage. In other cases, you’ll hear of an athlete arrested for driving under the influence (DUI) or worse, partaking in the use of illegal drugs.
Why is it that so many athletes turn to substance abuse?
Competition and the Need for Performance
Some forms of substance abuse are relatively easy to explain; athletes are desperate to get an edge over their top competitors, so they turn to performance-enhancing drugs like steroids and stimulants to boost their physical abilities. For example, there’s the famous Lance Armstrong doping case, in which professional cyclist Lance Armstrong was stripped of seven Tour de France titles. Armstrong explained his use of performance enhancing substances as being rooted in an overwhelming desire to win, at all costs.
Matters are made even more complicated by the fact that many other athletes are using performance-enhancing substances. When you’re competing in a field where 10 percent of players are using steroids and/or stimulants, you’ll naturally be at a disadvantage to that 10 percent; accordingly, you’ll feel more pressure to abuse these drugs to keep up. In time, that 10 percent becomes 15 percent, and before long, nearly the entire field is using the same collection of substances.
Stress and Pressure
It also stands to reason that many professional athletes turn to illicit substances as a way to cope with the stress and pressure of being a professional athlete. In many cases, athletes are expected to undergo hours of intense training every day. They’re expected to give their best performances in thunderous arenas, with millions of people around the world watching. They’re expected to keep their cool when their competitors are aggressively trying to unnerve them. And they’re constantly worried about losing their career to an injury, a misstep, or a younger, fiercer rival.
All this stress is difficult to deal with. Drinking or doing drugs provides a form of temporary relief, and if abused, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a dangerous habit. This is made even more complicated by the prevalence of mental health conditions in major athletes; if someone is experiencing a serious anxiety or mood disorder, the substance abuse can create a vicious feedback loop.
Money, Status, and Accessibility
Not all professional athletes are multimillionaires, but most of them make a good salary—and they enjoy at least semi-famous status. Their money, status, and accessibility feed the problem in a few different ways:
- It’s easy to find sources. Finding alcohol, nicotine, and other legal substances is easy, but finding steroids and certain types of illegal stimulants can be more challenging. For a practical celebrity with money and public recognition, getting these substances is much easier.
- Spending is trivial. When you make millions of dollars a year, or even hundreds of thousands, spending a few hundred dollars on drinks for the night is trivial.
- Others are afraid (or unwilling) to step in. If a pro athlete is surrounded by sycophants, managers, and hero worshippers, their behavior is likely to be enabled, rather than curtailed—no matter how bad it is.
Peer Pressure
Professional athletes in team sports often feel a sense of personal camaraderie with their teammates, and they go out of their way to do things together even outside of the sport they mutually enjoy. This is largely a good thing, but it also leads to the prevalence of party culture and peer pressure; oftentimes, if a few athletes on the team want to go out for a night of binge drinking or indulgence in drugs, the entire team will tag along and follow suit. Some athletes might also be peer pressured into trying substances or overindulging in ways they wouldn’t have discovered or tried by themselves.
Inherent Bias
It’s also worth noting that we may have an inherent bias in how we view athlete substance abuse, because of how closely we watch these celebrities. When a neighbor down the street gets arrested for a DUI, we might not hear about it, and if we do, we might not think much of it. But when the star of our favorite local sports team gets arrested for a DUI, it becomes national news—and everybody talks about it. The situation is magnified, so we naturally see it as a bigger problem than it actually is.
Even accounting for bias, it’s clear that professional athletes often must deal with problems related to substance abuse. The solution isn’t clear, since there are so many interacting factors responsible for this trend. However, it’s a problem we should all be taking seriously.
