We review this recent development of increasingly severe anti-doping control measures and find them based on questionable ethical grounds. The ethical foundation of the war on doping consists of largely unsubstantiated assumptions about fairness in sports and the concept of a "level playing field". Moreover, it relies on dubious claims about the protection of an athlete's health and the value of the essentialist view that sports achievements reflect natural capacities. In addition, costly anti-doping efforts in elite competitive sports concern only a small fraction of the population. From a public health perspective, this is problematic since the high prevalence of uncontrolled, medically unsupervised doping practiced in amateur sports and doping-like behavior in the general population (substance use for performance enhancement outside sport) exposes greater numbers of people to potential harm. In addition, anti-doping has pushed doping and doping-like behavior underground, thus fostering dangerous practices such as sharing needles for injection. Finally, we argue that the involvement of the medical profession in doping and anti-doping challenges the principles of non-malfeasance and of privacy protection. As such, current anti-doping measures potentially introduce problems of greater impact than are solved, and place physicians working with athletes or in anti-doping settings in an ethically difficult position. In response, we argue on behalf of enhancement practices in sports within a framework of medical supervision.