There are two attitudes to law enforcement. One of these, legal positivism, has the idea that the merits of a law are irrelevant, and those who break it should be punished. The other could be described as a form of utilitarianism, whereby a law is only a good one so long as the costs outweigh the benefits.
An example of this is the drug trade. It is four decades since America first declared war on drugs. At this point in time, there are around two million Americans incarcerated for drug offences. Yet there has never been an appreciable decline in the production, sale, or consumption of drugs since. For the positivist, this is irrelevant. The law exists, it should be enforced. For the utilitarian, the question arises of what to do when enforcing a law may be harmful to the greater good.
I say this by way of an extended preamble to an interesting question: Is it time to consider lifting the ban on performance-enhancing drugs? For all the work that has been done into the merits of narcotics laws, there has been surprisingly little advocacy for this point, which is odd, because it is a debate that sports really should have.
First, the obvious. The current anti-doping efforts clearly aren't up to task. In the case of baseball and cycling, in particular, neither sport enforces what little restrictions there are. A quick glance at Wikipedia's page on doping in cycling reveals that considerably more than half of the reported cases date from the past fifteen years. While this reflects in part the improved detection capabilities in place, as well as greater awareness, the fact that there hasn't been a major decline demonstrates just how ineffective the anti-doping legislation is.
Baseball is, if anything, worse. By the looks of things, every baseball record set in the past few years is suspect, with the current home-run record holder, Barry Bonds currently under investigation and his predecessor, Mark McGwire, already owning up to steroid use. MLB has shown itself to be essentially useless in dealing with this problem, forcing the US Congress to intervene. However, other American sports aren't much better, with nearly ten percent of NFL players admitting to steroid use.
Irish sportspeople are no strangers to drug controversies. Our last Olympic gold, in Athens 2004, was stripped from Cian O'Connor following a drugs bust on his horse. Then there was the whole Michelle De Bruin business. In our collective indignation following Janet Evans' bout of sore-loserism in 1996, we failed to note that not only was her performance way out of line with the expactation of what she'd do, but she was also engaged to a man who'd been done for drug use. A few years later, we were forced to rather sheepishly admit to ourselves that this, coupled with the whole dodgy urine sample business, might mean that she was using contraband. It was around this time that we stopped talking about Michelle Smith and accorded her the (foreign) surname she took when she married, as if to deny her Irishness.
The problem is that the laws are both unenforced and unenforceable. In the case of baseball, nobody has been too keen on unearthing the full scale of the problem, for fear that it would destroy the sport's reputation forever. Cycling has been better in this regard. However, with the exception of anabolic steroids, the majority of doping allegations are hard to prove. Consider that some performance-enhancing substances, notably nandrolone, occur naturally in the body. As a result, it becomes nearly impossible to convict someone of nandrolone doping beyond all reasonable doubt, though it has happened on occasion (step forward Linford Christie). And blood transfusions are undetectable.
So what? We still get a few people, and is it not better to at least get a few? Well, no. Simply put, an unenforceable law gives the lie to the adage that "cheats never prosper". Consider that people follow rules for two reasons. The first is the principled impact, namely that the law should be followed simply because it exists, regardless of how it is enforced. The second is pragmatic, namely the fear of the consequences of law-breaking. The second group cannot be called truly honest, as given the opportunity to avoid punishment, they will break the rules. So what we have here is a situation where we don't catch, and indeed cannot catch, a statistically significant enough number of athletes using performance-enhancing drugs that would-be users are deterred. As a result, only honest sportsmen have any incentive to be clean, namely their own consciences. Accepting that using these substances do improve athletic performance (a no-brainer), what this means is that cheats are likely to do better in the long run than fair players. Any law that penalises the honest to the benefit of the dishonest is clearly unjust.
What then? A case could be made for keeping anabolic steroids on a ban list. The stuff is highly dangerous and easily detectable, if there is blanket enforcement. As a result, it is an area where deterrence might be able to work, providing the main offenders agree to enforce their own rules. In the case of the majority of other substances, it may be time to revisit the question of decriminalisation.
There are, of course, a number of arguments against this, so let us examine the main ones. Firstly the wishy-washy notions of it cheapening the sport, or legitimising cheating. The problem here is that the sport is already cheapened and cheating already legitimised by our enforcing unenforceable rules. Everyone knows that doping is going on. How many of us can honestly say we don't look at the likes of Usain Bolt smashing the men's 100m record at a canter and not wonder if there was something afoot? It is the very uncertainty that cheapens the sport, by making every medal, every record suspect. However, given that most people only oppose the use of performance enhancing substances because it violates the rules, decriminalising them removes this problem.
Then there are the side effects of substance abuse. This is dealt with in a few ways. Firstly, steroids, the worst of them for side effects, can still be banned, as outlined above. The other is to realise that top-level sports, far from being the boon to health that regular exercise is, have reached levels where they can be quite destructive for the human body already, simply because the level of fitness a top athlete needs to sustain is more than the human body was designed to take over extended periods of time. Witness the increasing incidences of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome among male athletes. Then there are the sports that are inherently unhealthy. Sumo wrestlers live, on average, twenty years less than the male Japanese life expectancy. The goal of boxing is to mildly damage your opponent's brain, so as to knock him out. Concussions are now so commonplace among NFL quarterbacks that a recent Rolling Stone article suggested that it is only a matter of time before someone dies on the field. Clearly, there is an element of danger to sports, and the danger of side effects from doping aren't qualitatively different.
Also brought up is that drugs are an artificial aid in a field that is about raw human ability, and may discourage exercise in favour of quick-fix solutions. This falls on two grounds. Firstly, artificial aids already exist. The plethora of swimming records that have fallen in the past five years is not because of drastically improved fitness levels among swimmers, but because of developments in swimsuit technology. Can it truly be said that these records were broken solely based on the prowess of the athlete, or that the new swimsuit somehow detracts from them? If we were against all artificial aids in sport, swimmers would swim naked, and while this might boost TV ratings, nobody would seriously countenance that.
Secondly, doping doesn't suddenly turn you into Superman. No amount of nandrolone is going to enable a couch potato to beat even a moderately good athlete without considerable amounts of exercise. In addition, there's limits on how much doping can improve performances. As a result, while collectively athletes may become better, the individual differentials will still exist unchanged. The athlete with the greatest natural ability coupled with the best training regimen will still win out, because nobody will be able to gain a relative advantage through doping when everyone does it. This would also have the effect of removing the suspicion that every medal-winner faces, whether there were other factors at work. When someone wins a medal when all parties are doped, we know they've won on merit. When only a few are cheating, everyone's a suspect, and every win is questionable.
In the same way that society's war on drugs has put a lot of people in prison but never dented the narcotics business, so too have a lot of names fallen before the World Anti-Doping Agency. Floyd Landis, Dwain Chambers, Marion Jones, and a host of other stellar athletes who saw fit to break the rules. The problem is that for every one we take off the streets, someone else takes their place. Substance abuse is still endemic in sports, and shows no sign of falling off. Maybe it's time to learn to deal with reality as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.
Greg Bowler would like to assure readers that he has never won an athletic event while using a banned substance.
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