Editor,
How come it took Russian hackers to reveal to the generally ignorant public that there is such a thing as a medical exemption that allows Olympic athletes to take banned substances? How many of us knew about this? Our mainstream media should have told us this before the Olympics, before Simone Biles won all those Gold medals, rather than quietly acknowledging this after the fact.
At the very least, the World Anti-Doping Agency should have publicized that they have exemptions for athletes with a diagnosis as lightweight as ADHD (that Biles has), and are thereby permitted to take medication that clearly has a performance-enhancing effect.
A list of athletes permitted this exemption should be made public before every Olympics, and why they have been given the exemption – a decision that is inherently fuzzy, flawed and open to corruption. Thus can we even trust doctors doing the corresponding prescribing, after the complicity of doctors in the Lance Armstrong doping scheme orchestrated by the USPS, an arm of the U.S. government?
Such a list will allow all countries to see for themselves and get to debate what exactly constitutes a banned substance, especially as we move toward the subtle use of gene therapy infusions used instead for performance enhancement, moving on toward epigenetic, then hardcore genetic engineering developed initially toward controlling health problems.
What makes this broadly unfair is that rich nations such as the USA and Russia and increasingly China have the expensive biotechnological skills to be one step ahead in having their athletes imbibe substances that are not yet on the banned list, and such substances are prescribed medically within these countries today.
In contrast, at the last Olympics, how many other athletes other than Biles also had ADHD, but they were from countries too poor to be diagnosing ADHD, much less being able to afford medication to treat it?
Arun Ahuja
UNM student
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