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.
