Editor,—I recently attended the BASM Annual Conference, and was interested by the obviously conflicting views on and attitudes towards performance enhancing drugs highlighted during the discussions.

The divergence of opinion was extreme. In the blue corner was the “ban em and string em up” brigade and in the red corner the “lets forget about them and legalise them all” (well not quite so extreme).

The facts surrounding performance enhancing drugs remain.

• Athletes and recreational sportspeople use them, almost certainly, more than we imagine: as many as 2.8% of Canadian school children test positive for anabolic steroids.¹

• Unsupervised drug use increases the risks to the users immensely—for example, adverse effects, risk of infection.

• Drug testing fails to identify the users …