Competitive Gamers Will Now Be Tested For PED’s After It’s Discovered Everyone’s Crushing Adderall On The Reg

The Electronic Sports League (ESL for short) will begin testing competitive gamers for Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED’s) after it emerged that e-sports gamers are abusing adderall to gain a competitive advantage.

Both e-sports ‘athletes’ and e-sports leagues have long wanted to be taken seriously by non-gamers, so perhaps testing these gamers for PED’s is merely a PR move to try and elevate themselves on the level of the real sports leagues that test athletes for PED’s. That, or it might have something to do with the revelation that an entire Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team was crushing adderall to gain a competitive advantage at ESL’s recent tournament in Poland with a $250,000 prize pool.

VICE’s Motherboard reports:

Electronic Sports League (ESL), which is one of the largest eSports organizations in the world, will soon introduce and begin policing performance-enhancing drugs at its events.

The news comes after Cory “Semphis” Friesen, a high level, professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player, admitted last week he and other members of his team at the time, Cloud9, used Adderall, a psychostimulant usually used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), during ESL’s $250,000 tournament in Poland.

Head of Communications at ESL Anna Rozwandowicz told Motherboard in an email that it will outline the details of its new policy soon, but that for now it has “taken steps to move forward with drugs policing, education, and prevention among participants of [its] competitions.”

Friesen and the rest of Cloud 9, however, will not be punished for allegedly using Adderall at ESL’s event.

“We have no way of knowing whether Semphis, despite what he said, has actually taken Adderall or not,” Rozwandowicz said. “We can’t punish someone if we are not 100 percent sure he is guilty. And as we have no way to test it anymore (we’re four months after the event), we won’t take action in this specific case.”

I guess when a quarter million dollars is at stake people will do strange things. The thing that really bothers me about this though is that the e-sports league (ESL) thinks that somehow they’re above the WSOP, a series of competitive poker tournaments (60+ tournies each Summer), where hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, and they couldn’t care less about testing for adderall. So why in the hell does this e-sports video game league think they need to start testing?

As someone who has been known to dabble with adderall from time to time (the past 15 or so years), I’m guessing that the gamers taking adderall for a competitive advantage in e-sports also have a prescription. I think it’ll also crush the ESL to find out that leagues like MLB and NFL provide exemptions to athletes with prescriptions, so they’re going to be quite shocked when at the next tournament every single gamer shows up with an adderall prescription in hand.

For more on this story you can click on over to Motherboard and/or The Verge