The sports industry is an incredibly tough, fast-paced and competitive industry which places immense pressure on everyone involved. An undesirable effect of this situation is that countless athletes find themselves achieving results that they simply cannot achieve at this point; which leads them to seek out anything that will help them achieve their goal and not disappoint themselves, their family or their fans. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get an original essay This means they are moving towards performance-enhancing drugs, which means they will introduce drugs such as anabolic steroids for muscle building, insulin and human growth hormones in order to supplement the workout, giving them an unfair advantage against their opponents. There are around a hundred substances banned by WADA and yet one in ten or more athletes use performance-enhancing drugs, thirty-nine of the world's top rugby players use performance-enhancing drugs while 50 of the top players American football players use them and 9 of the last 30 Tour de France winners have been caught using them. This shows that this problem is not just localized or concentrated on a specific sport; This is actually a widespread problem that WADA is constantly working to resolve and put an end to. WADA is attempting to combat the use of performance-enhancing drugs by taking blood and urine samples and freezing them in order to retest them when another testing technique begins to be used by the organization . Unfortunately, performance enhancing drugs seem to be increasingly marketed to young bodybuilders. Gary Whitaker, a victim of this situation and his own ignorance, was a bodybuilder who used steroids for 15 years, three times a day. This led to kidney failure and the need to undergo a kidney transplant and dialysis three times a day. He explains that due to the fact that he was taking them daily several times a day, he felt like without them he was in pain and craved it. Some would say this is what an addict feels like during withdrawal. Sports scientist Dr Peter Angel says the official figure is only 60,000 people who regularly use performance-enhancing drugs. However, he estimates the exact real number to be around 100,000 people. Side effects include stomach ulcers and testicular atrophy and over the past 10 years the number of people who have developed these conditions has increased by 600%; there is also an increase in infections due to shared needle use. In addition to this, Harrison Pope, a researcher at Harvard since the 1980s, said that 30% of users become addicted due to performance enhancing drugs activating the same receptors as opioids and this was tested on a hamster in order to increase its validity. Along with this, it also appears to cause brain damage, as shown in a study that was essentially a comparison test including users, previous users, and control groups. The study tested the visuospatial sketchpad within both groups and found that while steroid users performed abysmally, previous users of performance-enhancing drugs performed equally poorly, suggesting that there is a higher risk of dementia and Alzheimer's.=122152590