Should doping be allowed in sport?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Should doping be allowed in sport?
Position1 of 3›: Yes, doping should be allowed
Argument‹3 of 7›: Policing doping is futile

Athletes and coaches are always one step ahead. They have more resources than the governing bodies and there will always be those that remain undetected, creating an artificial competitive advantage.

The argument

The Lance Armstrong scandal shed light on the reality of doping in professional sport. The cyclist famously never recorded a positive test for doping, despite using performance enhancing drugs rigorously and encouraging others to do so. The Armstrong incident reveals the futility in banning doping. The argument turns on what a testing regime can actually measure. A ban is only as strong as the detection system enforcing it, and a detection system can only identify what it already knows how to look for. That places testers structurally behind: a new substance, a new masking method or a new timing strategy has to exist and be in use before it can be characterised, validated and added to a screening panel. Athletes will always be one step ahead and detection rates will never reflect the full extent of those doping. The consequence is that a ban does not divide sport into clean athletes and doped ones. It divides it into three groups — athletes who do not dope, athletes who dope and are caught, and athletes who dope and are not — and the third group is precisely the one the system cannot size, because the only measure available is the test it has already evaded. If the governing bodies do not have the resources or technology to eradicate doping from sport, which they evidently don't, then they should permit doping. The reason is that partial enforcement is worse than none at all. Because continuing on with a situation where only a handful of perpetrators are caught affords those that can dope undetected an even greater advantage and undermines the premise of an even playing field in professional sport. A prohibition that catches a minority removes the least sophisticated offenders while leaving the most sophisticated in place, and it does so under a banner that assures spectators and rivals the field is level. Permitting doping, on this argument, at least replaces a false assurance of fairness with conditions that are honest and equally available to everyone competing.

Context

Athletes are always one step ahead of the testing bodies. They use designer drugs to escape detection and most offenders are not caught.

Premises

[P1]The Lance Armstrong case shows that athletes who dope can routinely evade detection, meaning bans cannot be effectively enforced. [P2] When only a fraction of dopers are caught, those who evade detection gain an unfair advantage over both clean athletes and those who are caught. [P3] Maintaining an unenforceable ban therefore undermines the level playing field more than permitting doping would. [C] Therefore, since policing doping is futile and counterproductive, doping should be allowed in sport.

Counter-arguments

If athletes are getting away with doping, we shouldn't throw in the towel and just permit performance enhancing drugs in sports. A far better response would be to invest more resources into policing to help governing bodies get ahead. The police play a game of cat and mouse with drug dealers, but they don't just accept their limitations and legalize all drugs. They invest more, develop new policing strategies and try to get ahead of the dealers. The same should apply to doping in sport.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Permitting doping is not the logical solution. Increasing investment in policing and detection is.