More Perspectives on Drug Testing in Sports

http://www.cagepotato.com/mma-steroid-busts-definitive-timeline/

I recently read a very interesting academic article on doping titled “Blue Sky Steroids”1 from the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.  In that article, Geoffrey Rapp introduced a very interesting perspective on drug testing.  Cleverly refuting several anti-doping arguments and citing the ineffectiveness of drug testing, he argued that doping should be allowed but subject to a full disclosure policy similar to the so-called ‘Blue Sky’ laws enforced on corporations. 

The ‘Blue Sky’ laws force companies to give shareholders full disclosure of what they are doing with their money.  So, though there are few direct limitations on what corporations can do with their investors’ money, they do have to take into account ‘market values.’  No want will want to invest with a company that makes foolish or overly risky decisions. 

Rapp believed that disclosure of players’ drug use would similarly subject team owners to ‘market values.’  If fans actually disapprove of doping, players who dope would loose their support.  I think that Rapp’s view deserves a second look because it allows for judgment on a case-by-case basis by the people whose opinions actually matter.  After all, the problem with doping is that detracts from the meaningfulness we find from success in sports, and meaningfulness is a matter of opinion.  An example Rapp used was that fans might disagree with a young, healthy player’s use of human growth hormone (HGH) but OK an older player using it to recover from an injury.

However, there is one problem I see with this solution.  If fans disapprove of doping then won’t athletes will simply go back to doping in secret and won’t we have the same drug testing problem all over again?  What do you think?

1. Rapp, Geoffrey. "Blue Sky Steroid." Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. 99.3 (2009): 599-618. Web. 14 Apr. 2012.

Perspectives on Drug Testing in Athletics

www.icassp2006.org

On February 17^th, I attended an international sports law symposium hosted by the Michigan Sports Law Society.  For one of the topics, Howard Jacobs, one of the leading athlete’s lawyers in the United States, and William Bock III, who has served as General Council to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) since 2007, discussed their perspectives on drug testing in athletics.  Both agreed that doping in order to increase athletic performance should be considered cheating, but they disagreed over the ways in which USADA handles drug testing and prosecution of those athletes who test positive.

Mr. Bock opened by discussing the difficulty of actually catching dopers.  He used as an example a blog that tells dopers how to avoid testing positive.  He also showed how athletes could use extremely complex and exact routines that involve ingesting huge amounts of chemicals to avoid detection.  However, these detection avoidance routines involve a lot of money too.  As a consequence, the athletes that actually get caught doping are usually just the ones who can’t afford the extensive lab work and expensive physicians that these complex routines require.  Another consequence is that just because an athlete never tested positive for steroids doesn’t mean he or she never used them.

Mr. Jacobs argued that current testing results in too many false positives.  He believes that substances other than steroids or accidental consumption cause the majority of positives in drug tests, citing problems such as the notoriously bad quality control in the supplement industry and the general athlete attitude, ‘I’m not taking illicit substances, so I don’t have to worry.’  USADA spends too much money prosecuting these false positives when it should be spending its money developing more accurate drug tests.

If an athlete tests positive, the burden then lies with the athlete to prove their innocence.  Then, even if the athlete shows that the positive was caused by, for example, accidental consumption of a substance through a contaminated supplement, he or she is still penalized, though less so than an intentional doper.  Does this seem right?  Mr. Bock argued that some of these excuses are ‘dog ate the homework’ excuses.  Also, even if an athlete accidentally consumed a substance they still might be receiving its illicit benefits.  Is USADA going about its drug testing and prosecution the right way?