Need an Edge? Try Performance Enhancing Placebos

If there’s nothing actually illegal in your steroid injection, is it still cheating? Placebos, long one of medicine’s top tools, can act as performance enhancing drugs, a new study has proven. The study pitted athletic young men against each other in a pain-endurance contest. Those given a morphine placebo won handily. Of course, the athletes have to believe they’re actually cheating.

Morphine, and other drugs providing temporary advantages, are only verboten during competitions, according to World Anti-Doping rules. So it would be perfectly legal to begin a morphine regimen in the off-season and continue it with placebos while competing. Their effectiveness would depend on athlete credulity, but as the Economist notes, doctors have been getting away with this stuff for millennia. (More performance-enhancing drugs stories.)