Ask HN: Should professional gamers be screened for performance enhancing drugs?

For example, stimulants, nootropics, anxiolytics, etc. My thought process came from thinking about the growth of regulation in the Olympics over many years. I'm curious to know what the community thinks about this, since professional gaming (or streaming) is becoming more and more popular by the day but is still relatively new as a "sport".

But not all stimulants etc are used for performance enhancement, etc. There are many legitimate uses so like anything else, there would have to be exceptions to “the rule.”

Right, in athletic sports, you're supposed to get by on training and skill. Drugs are seen as cheating. What sort of enhancements would be seen as cheating by gamers?

No.

Also I do not think Olympic athletes should be tested. I once competed at a very high level in sports and the use of drugs is significantly higher then anyone would expect. The difference was that the poorer countries only had access to old school steroids (testosterone, dbol, tren etc) while the richer countries had access to things which at the time were impossible to detect (GH, IGF-1, Research Peptides).

The effects of steroids specifically are seen many years after use, so unless you are testing the lifetime of an athlete the test is meaningless anyway.

2 twins, one does steroids for 2 years, one does not. The steroid user comes off of drugs for another 2 years, and still has a major advantage over the non-using athlete.

I'm not sure about beta blockers, but Adderall doesn't do well for games - it's more suited to holding down attention on things like spreadsheets. Modafinil doesn't work nearly as well as sleep. It helps in learning, but not so much on the battlefield, unless someone had an all nighter.

A few cups of tea might just do all of these better than drugs would. And things like L Theanine or creatine don't really need to be banned.