Here's am NYT story that I can link to from here. It's about performance enhancing drugs, but the performances in question were not athletic; they were musical.

RUTH ANN McCLAIN, a flutist from Memphis, used to suffer from debilitating onstage jitters.

"My hands were so cold and wet, I thought I'd drop my flute," Ms. McClain said recently, remembering a performance at the National Flute Convention in the late 1980's. Her heart thumped loudly in her chest, she added; her mind would not focus, and her head felt as if it were on fire. She tried to hide her nervousness, but her quivering lips kept her from performing with sensitivity and nuance.

However much she tried to relax before a concert, the nerves always stayed with her. But in 1995, her doctor provided a cure, a prescription medication called propranolol. "After the first time I tried it," she said, "I never looked back. It's fabulous to feel normal for a performance."

Ms. McClain, a grandmother who was then teaching flute at Rhodes College in Memphis, started recommending beta-blocking drugs like propranolol to adult students afflicted with performance anxiety. And last year she lost her job for doing so.

College officials, who declined to comment for this article, said at the time that recommending drugs fell outside the student-instructor relationship and charged that Ms. McClain asked a doctor for medication for her students. Ms. McClain, who taught at Rhodes for 11 years, says she merely recommended that they consult a physician about obtaining a prescription.

Ms. McClain is hardly the only musician to rely on beta blockers, which, taken in small dosages, can quell anxiety without apparent side effects. The little secret in the classical music world – dirty or not – is that the drugs have become nearly ubiquitous. …

Fascinating.

In sport, there is widespread agreement that drug-enhanced performances are not "real", although all the word-of-mouth I hear says that drugs are ubiquitous in athletics also, and the difference between the successful athletes and the ones who get banned is merely that the successful ones are more skilful at hiding what they are doing.

In classical music the debate is much more about whether drug-enhanced (or maybe that should be: drug-enabled) performances are actually as good as non-drug-enhanced(abled) ones. Use of such drugs is very widespread, says the NYT article …

But some performers object to beta blockers on musical rather than medical grounds. "If you have to take a drug to do your job, then go get another job," said Sara Sant'Ambrogio, who plays cello in the Eroica Trio. Chemically assisted performances can be soulless and inauthentic, say detractors like Barry Green, the author of "The Inner Game of Music," and Don Greene, a former Olympic diving coach who teaches Juilliard students to overcome their stage fight naturally. The sound may be technically correct, but it's somewhat deadened, both men say. Angella Ahn, a violinist and a member of the Ahn Trio, remembers that fellow students at Juilliard who took beta blockers "lost a little bit of the intensity," she said. Ms. Ahn doesn't use the drugs, she said: "I want to be there 100 percent."

Indeed, the high stakes involved in live performance are part of what makes it so thrilling, for both performers and audiences. A little onstage anxiety may be a good thing: one function of adrenaline is to provide extra energy in a threatening or challenging situation, and that energy can be harnessed to produce a particularly exciting musical performance. Performance anxiety tends to push musicians to rehearse more and to confront their anxieties about their work; beta blockers mask these musical and emotional obstacles.

For me, classical music is the drug.

Next: drug enhanced blogging …

My thanks, as so often, to Arts & Letters Daily for the link.