The Electronic Sports League has announced that it will soon begin drug testing its competitors.

The first randomized performance enhancing drugs skin tests will be held at the ESL One Cologne event in August, and more tests are planned to be performed at every event in the IEM, ESL One, and ESL ESEA Pro League competitions.


Last week, professional Counter Strike: Global Offensive player Cory "Semphis" Friesen admitted that he and other members of the Cloud9 team had used Adderall during an ESL tournament.

Adderall is a drug usually used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In this case, it was allegedly used to increase focus and reaction time during the $250,000 tournament. According to Motherboard, Semphis will not be punished, as the league "can't punish someone if we are not 100 percent sure he is guilty."



Today's press release states that the ESL has partnered with NADA (Nationale Anti Doping Agentur) in Germany to help "research and determine an anti-performance enhancing drugs policy that is fair, feasible and respects the privacy of the players, whilst simultaneously providing conclusive testing results."

ESL will also be partnering with the World Anti Doping Agency in order to internationalize this policy to regions such as the US, Asia, and Australia.

Wow, even E-sports players are started taking drugs to increase their performance. It's even amazing how many makes people do crazy shits. Previously it was match-fixing in Esports and now it's drug abuse

That's incredible, I had some thoughts of drug use in eSports quite some time ago, but it didn't really seem that bad compared to hacking, in games such as csgo.