In today's highly competitive athletic environment more and more sportsmen and women are turning to fast fixes in the shape of pills and substances to achieve their goals. Sports stars, striving for perfection, see performance-enhancing drugs (PED's) as a shortcut to success, which is why many succumb to temptation, even though they run the risk of being tested and ultimately banned.

Unsurprisingly, performance-enhancing drugs do exactly as their name suggests: enhance a persons physical performance. The phrase has, however, been used to refer to several distinct classes of drugs, which include nootropics, adaptogens, painkillers, blood boosters, and ergogenic acids, many of which in turn include stimulants and lean mass builders that are used to drive or amplify the growth of muscle and lean body mass as well as reduce body fat.

One type of ergogenic acid you'll all have heard of is anabolic steroids, which was the drug of choice for superstars such as bulging bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger and big-time baseball batter Barry Bonds.

The primary reason why PED's are outlawed in professional sports by the United States Anti Doping Agency is that they have been deemed to give the users an unfair and unmerited advantage over the rest of the field. It is the job of the various sports leagues to conduct regular yet random drug testing on their respective athletes in an attempt to identify the cheaters and bring them to justice, but the stiff punishments and fines have evidently not deterred others from trying to cheat the system.

Every year there seems to be another major doping scandal at the Tour de France, with competitors continuing to take their chances and trying to cut corners (and I don't mean on the course), even after Lance Armstrong was left disgraced, having his seven titles stripped away from him and handed a lifetime ban from the sport.

Once idolized by millions, Armstrong's reputation has been left in tatters, with little hope of him ever being able to put the pieces back together. But the fact that at his peak he was invincible, having overcome cancer and powered his way to back-to-back Tour de France titles in the space of a few years, makes people question why athletes should not be allowed to use PED's.

PED's, depending on their function, do things to the human body that elevate it to levels it would not usually be able to attain. Blood boosters such as Erythropoietin (EPO), for example, increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood beyond the individual's natural capacity, which is why users caught using the drug usually compete in endurance sports such as long-distance running and cycling.

It is possible, however, to increase red-blood cell production in other, legal ways, such as training in high altitudes. Both confer the same advantage to those who use each different method, so why is one legal and the other not?

Even household items such as certain painkillers and caffeine can be classed as performance enhancing drugs in sport, yet nobody would bat an eyelid if you arrived in the office on Monday morning with a cup of coffee in hand, washing back a couple of painkillers to banish your lingering hangover.

In addition to drugs, there are also other foreseeable, potentially unethical ways for athletes to gain an unfair advantage in the future. Surgery and, ultimately, technological augmentations could also help athletes towards the top of the podium. For instance, baseball pitchers who have undergone surgery to replace a damaged elbow ligament with tissue from a hamstring or forearm tendon claim that they can throw harder after the recommended two-year rehabilitation process. As athletes are already willing to go to the extremes of taking illegal substances, how long will it be before they start seeking unneeded surgery to modify their bodies and enhance their performance?

Should it happen, it will certainly be interesting to see whether it is deemed illegal or just unethical, but legal.

Although mechanically speaking, replacing entire joints or bones would be unlikely to work for an elite athlete, as too many screws could come loose and the artificial joint would probably not work with the same efficiency as a natural one, but that could all change should researchers make major advances in engineering skin, tendons and other replacement body parts in the laboratory.

Now some of you probably have an image in your minds of Frankenstein playing centre-forward for Manchester United, but that's not really what I'm hinting at. Instead picture, for example, a swimmer undergoing a skin graft to increase webbing between the fingers and toes to improve stroke and kicking capacity.

If you're still struggling to imagine that, lets use a more realistic example. Take the "blade runner," Oscar Pistorius, for example. Ignoring recent events, he was a fantastic athlete, but he would not have been had it not been for his carbon-fibre, prosthetic "cheetah-style" legs. He was so good he even competed in the Olympics against fully able-bodied athletes. But this begs the question: what if one day somebody created an artificial limb that made the wearer run much faster than the human leg would normally allow?

This bionic limb would open the door to all sorts of performance enhancing technologies and the Paralympics would become almost like a human-machine hybrid sport like race car driving, where both components — the machine and the man — would work together to achieve the win. These kinds of tweaks to our biology are likely ways that people could try to gain an advantage over others, but would that advantage be seen as unfair in the same way that PED's are?

Personally I have always been fascinated with discovering ways of making my body work above and beyond its means, and have to admit to seeing the attraction of PED's, although I doubt I will ever be fully seduced by them.

To any athlete, the though of being able to run ten percent faster, jump one foot higher, or bench 80 lbs. heavier, understandably, is appealing. But by making your body work out of its natural capacity, you are exposing yourself to countless health risks such as liver abnormalities and heart and circulatory problems, just to name a few. The human body has its limits for a reason.

For a variety of reasons, there's a social consensus that PED's should be banned in professional sport, although it is difficult to determine where the line has been drawn, if the line does in fact exist at all.

Bizarrely, and it's difficult to comprehend why, we've collectively agreed its fine for an injured football player to take a dose of Toradol to help mask the pain of an injury, but not a shot of testosterone or anabolic steroids to help that injury heal faster. It is these inconsistencies, as well as those mentioned above, which makes people wonder how "unfair" PED's really are.

The crux of the question really balances on the idea of the outcome of sports being fair and determined by who has the most natural talent; who worked the hardest on the training ground and who got their tactics correct, not who took the best drug. If the very spirit of sport includes the idea of hard work and determination, taking drugs should be seen as a way of succeeding but with less effort, and it is therefore correct that users found guilty should be stripped of their titles.

Another alternative, of course, would be to completely level the playing field and make PED's legal for everyone. Although, due to the health risks, this would almost likely never happen, it certainly would be interesting to see a performance-enhanced athletics.