There has been much comment as to the futility of anti-doping measures and suggestions that drugs should be permitted in sport. This notion fails to realize that the main function of antidoping is to protect athletes and make sports participation safe and fair. Sport will always be difficult; safe sport, however, is attainable.

Performance enhancing drug abuse is a real temptation for the modern-day athlete with 25% of all gym users in the UK experimenting with these agents. It causes chronic ill health and occasionally death:

recent research suggests performance-enhancing drugs abuse may have an association with 'sudden cardiac death syndrome'. Athletic drug abusers are also dangerous to others. The syndrome of 'road rage' is well recognized where a steroid abuser behaves in an out of character violent fashion.

Performance enhancing drug abuse also frequently acts as an entry point to street drug abuse, affecting up to 85% of all steroid users. The 1998 Tour de France champion, Marco Pantani, died from a cocaine overdose.

The inescapable fact is that athletes cheat. Cheating in sport is as old as sport itself.

Galen observed Greek athletes in 280 BC imbibing wild berries to gain a stimulant effect. Ben Johnson cheated with performance enhancing drugs to win the 100m Olympic gold medal in 1988. From that moment on, drug cheating has become a reality and a consistent bedfellow of modern sport.

Then drug testing was in its infancy. Today, the science of drug detection is very sophisticated. Isotope carbon testing allows the tester see an individual's testosterone 'fingerprint' which is unique to each individual. Abuse of the blood booster EPO can be observed by calculating the molecular weight of the substance. These scientific advances have led to the recent upsurge in detection of the drug abusers.

Athletes and their advisors are not beyond using science to muddy the water following a positive test. Alcohol ingestion was offered as an explanation by the recent Tour de France champion, for his positive test.

While this is a scientific possibility, it does not explain the isotope carbon test which confirmed that the elevated testosterone in the cyclist was not his own but was ingested.

Suddenly the advisors and their excuses evaporated.

Modern sport is big business;

athletes cheat to benefit from the huge financial and social rewards of success. Failure to do so will not only ensure that sport will continue to be sullied and lose its rightful place in our society; more importantly young athletes may suffer lifealtering health effects of the increasingly common practice of performance-enhancing drug abuse. The fight against drugs in sport must continue if we wish to maintain safe sport for the following generations.

Dr Conor O'Brien, Chair of anti-doping committee, Faculty of sports and exercise medicine, Royal College of Surgeons, 123 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2.