ABSTRACT
The ingestion of substances by athletes with the intention of enhancing or influencing performance in sport is probably as old as sport itself. The widespread use of sophisticated chemical agents in sport and society emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in parallel with the evolution of the modern pharmaceutical industry. As new drugs were being discovered through methods of chemical synthesis rather than from extraction of plant or animal sources, the pharmaceutical industry also developed its processes of chemical analysis in order to test its products for efficacy and safety. It was this evolution of sensitive methods of drug screening that became the basis of the subsequent development of accurate methods of drug testing in sport.
