A Voice of Sanity Amidst the PED Cacophony

As a general rule I've devoted relatively little time to the issue of performance enhancing drugs in sports. The people who get most exercised about it tend to engage in levels of sanctimony that quickly become intolerable, and we're such enormous hypocrites about it: NFL guys get caught all the time for using PED's, get slapped on the wrist with a four-game suspension, and that's that. And the NFL probably has the most sane approach. People simply go insane over baseball, and perhaps worse, they get even crazier over sports, such as cycling, that they generally do not give a damn about.

In a post at his truly excellent sports blog for The Boston Globe, Charles Pierce has what is one of my absolutely favorite arguments about this whole mess:

As I always point out, this is not my drug frenzy, but, even if it were, I'd need an offer of proof beyond the argumentum ad hogwash and, no, citing The Canseco Precedent is not it. The people who get their plumbing in a knot over this stuff are the people insisting on more, better, and more intrusive drug testing. You cannot do that, and then dismiss negative testing results just because you don't like them. And, in the absence of an admission and/or a positive test, you can't simply decide who's using and who's not based on who you like and who you don't.

Bingo. This is absolutely right, but the people who most need to hear it are the shrillest voices in the debate to begin with.