Clare pharmacist Brendan Rochford, who co-ordinates the medicine search database eirpharm.com, believes the full extent of problems suffered by doping athletes has yet to surface.
Mr Rochford says many athletes "who have bowed out of sport do not want to admit or publicise their problems".
"The quest for increased performance leads to increased dosages and using these products at high doses can have serious side effects," he says.
Any move to liberalise the doping laws, he believes, would only change the goalposts as we would still have to impose limits on the levels of drugs athletes could take. This would effectively encourage risk as athletes will always try to gain a competitive edge.
"Ultimately the person who would win would be the person who was willing to put their lives most at risk," he says.
This is not a view shared by Prof Ellis Cashmore of Staffordshire University's School of Health who says it is a myth that athletes would take more testosterone or do EPO for longer periods if given the chance.
Cashmore believes athletes, if properly informed of the risk, would not recklessly endanger their lives.
"In any case more of a substance is not necessarily going to improve performance and why would athletes - who have an interest in their own health - so flagrantly disregard medical advice," he says.Cashmore is an advocate of legalising performance-enhancing drugs and believes that if sport is serious about safeguarding the health of athletes everything should be brought out in the open.
"If we really wanted to take the health of competitors into consideration - a more honest approach would be to say let's have this out in the open - discover what people are using and advise accordingly but we can't do research along those lines by simply not condoning the dope taking that is going on."
Opponents of liberalising the laws, he claims, say this would lead to a nightmare scenario where all athletes would take drugs and Olympics would descend into a farcical showcase for the world's fastest junkies.
But he argues that this so called nightmare scenario is what we have now. He believes that 80 per cent of world records in athletics have been set in performance assisted ways.
Cashmore is keen to stress that he is no advocate of drug taking but a pragmatist who accepts doping in sport as a fact of life.
But Dr Conor O'Brien, World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) member and a consultant physician in the Blackrock Clinic, believes liberalisation will not lead to greater control of doping but the opposite.
"More liberal laws may be fine for the elite-end athletes who have doctors and pharmacologists working for them but if you go to the second team or the wannabes they are going to be stuck with the bootleg versions of these drugs.
"Cheaper versions are often contaminated and the aspiring professionals will be without medical supervision or blood tests. It won't be the elite athletes dropping dead but the local gym goers," he says.