Update: In a press release earlier today, ESL said it will be working with the World Anti Doping Agency to begin administering PED skin tests starting at the ESL One Cologne event in August. These tests do not require a blood sample, instead simply checking for the presence of drugs via a swab across the skin.

Original story:

eSports are already rivaling traditional sports in viewership ratings, and pro game players are seeing career-ending injuries in the style of their more athletic counterparts. Now, numerous eSports leagues are once again mimicking the world of physical sports in preparing to crack down on the use of performance-enhancing drugs at tournaments.

Widespread use of attention-focusing drugs like Adderall has been something of an open secret in the eSports community for a while; eSports consultant Bjoern Franzen publicly warned of rampant eSports pill-popping last year and an excellent Eurogamer exposé on the problem from April included many anonymous players admitting to widespread drug use. But the issue really came to a head earlier this month when Kory "Semphis" Friesen, a former member of high-profile pro gaming team Cloud9 who was recently let go for poor performance, admitted in a video interview that "we were all on Adderall" during Electronic Sports League (ESL) tournaments. "It's pretty obvious if you listen to the comms," Friesen said, referring to the frenetic, hectic back-and-forth on in-game chat channels.

The interview seems to have been a wake-up call for some eSports leagues to tighten up their drug enforcement. "The integrity of our sport is and always will be our biggest concern," ESL Head of Communications Anna Rozwandowicz told Wired UK. "When we first saw [Friesen's comments], we focused immediately on kickstarting a policy-making process and adjusting the rules."

While details of those adjustments have yet to be made public, Rozwandowicz said that "with the new general policy and specific updates to our tournament rules, we are hoping to have a waterproof strategy for identifying PEDs, testing for their presence and punishing players who were caught using any of the forbidden substances."

The ESL and some other leagues already had rules regarding illegal drug use at tournaments—Major League Gaming says it defers to the World Anti-Doping Agency's standards for prohibited substances. But since few major eSports leagues actually test for these substances, these rules are often nearly impossible to enforce.

Rozwandowicz admitted to Wired UK that "there has never been a case of us finding out a player took drugs—any kind of drugs—during our events, and as such we never had to punish anyone for it." A representative from eSports league Gfinity told The Daily Dot that "we actively approach any players we suspect of using PEDs and up until now we have had only one incident which turned out to be a player taking Pro Plus [a caffeine supplement]."

That Gfinity rep went on to tell The Daily Dot that drug testing is "something we feel will be introduced sooner rather than later... high-level competition requires drug testing to prove innocence, as unfortunately due to the numerous examples in traditional sports we now live in a world where drug testing is required to not only catch and expose cheats but more importantly to protect the image of the genuine superstars."

Aside from any reputational risks, abuse of drugs like Adderal and Propanalol comes with plenty of health risks that eSports leagues may rightly want to protect their players from. The South Korea-based International eSports Federation (IeSF) cited side effects like nausea, diarrhea, heart failure, hair loss, hallucinations, nightmares, and sexual and erectile dysfunction as reasons for its "active fighting against doping," which has included drug testing since 2013.

"Definitely, doping is a problem in eSports, as any other existing sport," IeSF's Alex Lim told Wired UK. "We know that some people might not agree with this [because] eSports does not include much physical activity [and] is more based on mental ability. However, it is not quite true. Activities and performances can all be explained within the range of physiology, and as using the physiological approach, eSports must be directly influenced by any doping activity in terms of performance."