Article 2 is a central provision of the Code which Signatories must implement without significant amendment. The Article will generally be reproduced verbatim in all Code-compliant doping policies and sets out the violations which may be committed by athletes and other persons who are bound by the Code, and which anti-doping organisations will seek to investigate and establish before tribunals.

Doping is defined by Article 1 as the occurrence of one or more of the anti-doping rule violations in Article 2.1. While collectively defined as doping by Article 1, the violations in Article 2 extend beyond the violations of doping (in the sense of having an athlete having a prohibited substance or its metabolites or markers in his or her bodily sample or using a prohibited method) and refusing to submit to testing, which have largely been the focus of anti-doping investigations and proceedings to date, and include violations which involve various forms of intentional conduct relating to prohibited substances or the testing process. This general range of violations was present in the OMADC, and in many sports anti-doping policies before the Code, but the enforcement of anti-doping regimes focused, to a considerable degree, on the detection of the presence of Prohibited Substances and Methods by collecting and analysing bodily samples for testing.