The argument I've heard against this is about safety. Firstly, you don't want athletes needing to push the limits of safe pharmaceutical use just to win. This forces all competitive athletes to dose the maximum amount allowed. Moreover, though perhaps less of an issue, it forces those who seek an illegitimate advantage to push even further than they need to now.

Secondly, this 'sets a bad example'. Not in the moral sense, but in a pragmatic sense. Regulated doping in competition encourages enthusiastic amateurs to also start doping. Not only does it seem wrong to require aspiring amateurs to take medical steps, there is the added issue of lack of guidance. Amateurs have less of a support team around them, thus making mistakes or uneducated use more likely.

In the end, you rule against doping not to keep the sport fair, but to keep the sport safe for aspiring amateurs and professionals. In turn, this keeps the sport alive by having a steady influx.

There is a fairness issue regarding 'pay to win' becoming a more effective strategy whilst, at the same time, also increasing the financial barrier to entry.

Athletes in many high paying and highly respected disciplines were caught on short and long term use of forbidden drugs. This includes top names e.g. in tennis and cycling. These sportsmen dont seem to care about safety too much. They just probably want to win.

If professional orgs would ban athletes for life, there would be little doping, but somehow nobody does that. Why? Perhaps money from sponsors is much more important than safety and fairness?

Is it fair to punish people so harshly?

Make the punishment for burglary the death penalty, and burglary would go down. And yet, such harsh punishment is generally frowned upon.

This doesn't seem an adequate analogy to banning someone from sports: if a burglar was sentenced to death we would be taking all he has and also permanently punishing his loved ones. By banning a sportsman we take away his career, but he is free to pursue anything else and continue life in his community, contributing to it. We may consider taking back some of the winnings as punishment. Removing someone from a circle of trusted athletes is not really a punishment -- it's a punishment for that community to endure such misconduct.

My point is that the efficacy of a punishment as a deterrent isn't sufficient reason to instate that punishment. There needs to be proportionality between the offense and the punishment.

So, just because lifetime bans would be an effective deterrent doesn't mean that we should instate lifetime bans.

Yes, I agree that how strong a deterrent is is not necessarily the best way to decide how to punish. But again, I can't claim it _would_ work, I'm just saying that there are other reasons to punish people who willingly violate basic rules they agreed to previously. If there were no consequences to those violations (like there often aren't any if you violate some less important road traffic rules) I'd say "screw the rules", but if someone is winning millions, fame, respect etc. at the expense of his fair competitors, I'd say "bye bye" as soon as I could.

Such moral violation is for me first sign that counterparty is dangerous to the well being of others. Why not exclude such counterparties from the game altogether? I don't care as much if it will deter the future ones, I just want the ones already caught to be out of the game!

> Make the punishment for burglary the death penalty, and burglary would go down.

Depends on the context, if it's hard to be caught or people who commit burglary today are people that are ready to accept any risk due to their socioeconomic condition then it's not a good deterrent.

If you make the penalty for burglary the death penalty, then any burglar will kill anyone they can to avoid being caught. I.e. why rob a house with an elderly occupant who might identify you when you could just kill them? Escalating penalties put more things on the table, too.

I don't think that argument really holds up. After all, athletes already push the limits of safe exercise in order to win; all competitive athletes are forced to exercise the maximum amount allowed, and exercise is not purely positive: it has negative as well as positive effects.

I don't follow you. You seem to be saying that since athletics is about pushing the limits of the human body, it's already unsafe, so there's no problem with making it much less safe. I strongly disagree. For context, I'm thinking mostly of athletics (track and field).

Pro athletes generally strive to achieve excellence at some task the human body is adapted for -- running, jumping, throwing. But it's within the limitations imposed by their own human bodies, which are very well-adapted for keeping themselves safe while accomplishing these tasks. They know that going overboard risks burnout and injury, so their incentives are generally aligned with staying healthy. Chemically tricking the body into doing something long-term unsafe in return for short-term performance is a different ballgame.

(Of course there are a few outlier sports like American football and sumo wrestling which are just clearly unhealthy. Even for those, I don't see why we should make matters worse by sanctioning unhealthy PEDs.)

PEDs can also greatly improve the safety profile of a sport. For example, anabolic steroids increase strength and improve recovery, which significantly lowers the risk of missing an olympic lift such as the clean and jerk and possibly injuring oneself. Anabolic steroids can also increase bone density, which lowers the risk of general injury across all sports.

The risk of missing a lift would still be the same since they would just try to lift heavier weights.

They would only try to lift heavier than their competition, so there's an artificial limit on how heavy one would go.

But the real crux of the situation is this: For a given individual, on every possible lift and every possible weight, it is always safer to use anabolic steroids than not.

That's an interesting angle.

I believe there was an article posted on HN a while about about whether or not humans could improve the speed of a fastball in baseball. If I recall correctly, the suggestion was that one of the ligaments can not stand the stress above a certain speed.

There are many sports (especially in track and field!) where we are meeting the limitations of normal humans. Can you be a world class sprinter if your body is not aligned to it at birth? If you are disadvantaged at birth, how reasonable is it that after sacrificing most of your life to training you are going to accept inevitable failure? What if a PED can push you over the top?

One of my favourite quotes of all time is from the Simpsons: "Cheating is the gift man gives himself".

With billions on the planet and hundreds of millions who are rich enough to pursue sport, the pool of people who have the drive and are willing to dedicate everything to being the best at their sport is HUGE. What is sport at that point? Filtering for genetic freaks?

But then, looking at it another way, should we then see it as a technological challenge? Let's look at cycling. Whether or not we accept the premise that doping and PEDs in the pro peloton are a thing of the past, it's hard to argue with the success of Sky's "marginal gains" strategy. The margins of victory in large stage races are so minute that even a 10 watt difference could be meaningful.

I kind of look at this as an F1 style of sports. Those with the access to money for research will win (as we see with Sky in cycling). If we include PEDs? Well, then money for research becomes even more important.

Now, I actually like F1 racing (even while not really liking cars -- I'm complicated ;-) ). I like pro cycling. I like a lot of things. But, I honestly don't think this is the direction that sports should go. As someone who participated in track and field in his youth, I'm highly disillusioned with current trends -- competition for medals, the need to beat world records, people sitting on their sofa watching 10 minute vignettes of "life drama" with occasional intermissions of some guys running.

Sports for me is 50 year olds getting together for a game of soccer; jogging in the morning every day to get ready for the 10 km "marathon"; riding in a "sportive"; softball; hockey; kendo; whatever you enjoy doing.

Watching people at the top level is awesome, but we don't need to enhance it. We don't need to embellish it. We certainly don't need to pay someone the GDP of a small country so that we can have bragging rights at the office the next week. Especially if a PED makes the difference between a struggling athlete bagging groceries for a living or living the life of a super star.

The problem is that sports competition is zero-sum: it doesn't really matter whether the fastest run takes 4 minutes or 3:59, but it does matter whether you're a second faster than your competitor. This quickly generates a "race to the bottom" where everyone has to pay absolute costs for relative advantages.

This is less desirable outcome than is ideal, which is why there's room for making everyone better off through enforcement of norms against PEDs. It's a question of what everyone must do in order to be competitive.

That said, there should be a conversation about whether the cure is worse than the disease. If PEDs are safe enough, the costs of enforcement and allowing the cheaters who make it through the screens to win will outweigh the benefits of having the bar for competition lowered.

"This quickly generates a "race to the bottom" where everyone has to pay absolute costs for relative advantages."

I really like this framing. You've expressed something I've felt intuitively but never really been able to articulate (either to myself or others).

As a side note: this framing is why I oppose subsidizing college in the US. Having a college degree is mostly a relative advantage, especially outside of STEM. We only need so many firefighters, so if we preferentially hire applicants with college degrees and subsidize college, it's kinda pointless.

Better is making sure that economic opportunities remain available for those without degrees, when possible. Make it illegal to discriminate against those without college degrees unless it's a bona-fide occupational qualification.

Why can't we do both? Poor kids who would get a great benefit from college deserve as much help as poor kids who wouldn't benefit from college but would benefit from vocational training. If the object is to effectively help everyone, only doing half is a bad thing.

Because there's a limited number of "slots" for the sorts of white-collar professional careers that a college degree gives you preferential treatment for. Putting another student through law school does not make law firms hire more lawyers. It means that the average quality of hired lawyers goes up while one more person with a law degree fails to get employed in the field.

The analogy would be more clear with sports - putting more effort into youth basketball training won't make more NBA players, it will just make NBA players better.

This is the "lump of labor" fallacy. The NBA has a finite number of teams and only adds to them slowly. Having more good white-collar professionals often means that companies can expand and make more money.

Even if there were a finite number of "slots", not funding smart poor kids to go to college is a dumb idea. Having smarter/better candidates for the "slots" is better.

Of course, different professions have different amounts of "get a bigger piece of the pie" versus "make the pie bigger". The trades are more obviously positive-sum: if people get better at making houses, more houses end up getting built for people to enjoy. Things like patent trolling are negative-sum: when a patent-trolling office expands, they do so at the cost of putting others out of work at a greater rate.

However, this isn't the point that the "free college for everyone" crowd is aware of, let alone considering. It's straight equivocation between "college degree holder earns on average $X more" and "an extra college degree is worth $X more to society as a whole".

Well, "legal" and "allowed in the sport" are two different concepts.

Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland. It's just the US that criminalizes them, and probably has influenced the decision to ban them outright.

Regulation is another thing. I'd actually say they are regulated, in that the current rule is "don't take them". And even enforcing that relatively simple rule - just detect them, is actually a hard problem we can't solve very well, given the amount of athletes that lost medals over the last couple of olympics.

In the end, PED regulation is just another set of rules added to each sport. These are professional athletes, and most manage to not run into any problems understanding and following the rules. Adding some kind of "permitted level of use" is theoretically possible, but I suspect you'll just end up spending a lot more money trying to detect how much anyone is using at a particular period of time, etc. etc. Add stupid political pressure from the US federal government, and I'd imagine any kind of "lenient system" would just be far, far more expensive to execute.

> Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland

This is not entirely true. You will not be penalized for possessing anabolic steroids in Poland but selling without prescription is illegal. So without prescription the only way to get them is black market and there are tons of fakes on black market. So you don't really know what you are buying..

There's also testing kits you can buy and most of these markets the customers are posting results of the tests and blood work to verify the source is legitimate. It's actually a quite reliable and honest economy because of how much scrutiny people have over putting vials of oil in their bodies. It's an interesting market dynamic considering it's completely unregulated and illegitimate.

The point is that the athlete isn't considered a criminal for possessing them in Poland, whereas in the US, they are.

To further muddy the waters, in the context of sports, "legal" generally means "allowed in the sport", not just "non-criminal".

I have recently suffered a traumatic brain injury (tbi) - not unlike what may be common in football, hockey and other contact sports - and not exactly pleased with the medical response that there is no real treatment other than rest, I began doing some research and came across an open letter from a Harvard PhD to the NFL commissioner regarding cannabis and concussions, CTE and TBI. They focus on the CBD heavy variety and suggest it acts as a neuroprotector. Then a little more research I came across an Israeli study regarding TBI improvements in rats using cannabis, I even thought I found an article saying the Israeli military uses cannabis for treatment of soldiers and enemy combatants with TBI but I can't seem to find it now.

I'm not so sure about peds for competition or recovery, but if cannabis is considered a ped by various sports commissions and can be beneficial to brain injury that is a damn shame.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3gqe/the-nfl-sh...

http://www.timesofisrael.com/cannabis-could-treat-traumatic-...

If you have suffered TBI I highly suggest getting neurofeedback training to try and repair any possible damage caused to the brain by the injury. It is a very powerful tool to change the structure of your brain. Just make sure you find a specialist that can accurately create a profile for your particular set of circumstances and creating a special training program for that. I almost signed up for a borderline scam, but luckily found the leading expert in the field (She essentially pioneered Neurofeedback training).

Cannabis is not considered a PED (anyone who has taken Cannabis can easily atttest to that).

Cannabis is a problem due to other political issues which means it's illegal in most major sport playing jurisdictions.

It might be performance enhancing. I say that partially because marijuana may be a bronchodilator, but mostly because I know many college and some pro athletes who use marijuana. I can run a sub 11 second 100m while very high.

> Cannabis is not considered a PED (anyone who has taken Cannabis can easily atttest to that).

Cannabis is very, very, much considered a PED. It is banned in competition by USADA and WADA.

Anesthetizing effects, motor processing effects, lung performance, etc...

I will agree that most people most of the time are not smoking and becoming super athletes. I do not agree that athletic performance is unaffected by it and that it's consequences are universally negative. Hence the ban against using it in fair athletic competition.

To me, this doesn't seem to fall under performance-enhancing drugs as much as medication for injuries sustained in the sport.

There was a periodic survey of Olympic athletes asking "would you take a PED that guaranteed a gold medal and shortened your lifespan to five years?", more than half said yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman%27s_dilemma

The update in that wikipedia link point to changing attitudes in more recent years.

"It would kill you five years after you took it", that's quite more drastic than reducing your life span by 5 years.

A somewhat recent update (delayed release) with anonymous survey shows around 50% to be the actual number of admitted dopers. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/29/sport-doping-s...

Do you only mean professional athletics?

My only issue is that athletics start at a young age for most. For some sports, people routinely go pro in their teenage years (tennis, baseball, etc.). We would have parents PEDing up their kids just to get the college scholarships or drafted out of high school. Feels like that would do more harm than good.

> Do you only mean professional athletics?

The vast majority of Olympic athletes are not professionals.

The problem there is that you are then encouraging people to use substances which are potentially detrimental to their long term health. In fact, they'd have to use them to be competitive.

Of course, it's perfectly valid to say that we're already at that point, but I don't know that sanctioning their use is the right thing to do for the governing bodies. I don't know what the answer is, but I agree completely that they should be illegal in the eyes of the law.

Basically everything about professional sports is detrimental to long-term (or even mid-term) health, yet no-one seems to have a problem with it unless it involves "chemicals".

Is there any evidence for this? Other than possible joint pains, which are likely no worse than doing a regular factory job, and sports like NFL and fighting where hitting each other is the point, and are probably more comparable to gladiator sports than something like basketball or baseball.

I suspect the better fitnes that sports persons have in most other sports, combined with the above average income, means they almost certainly have better health than the average person, even after adjusting for the fact that they likely have better physical health genes.

Some sports.

As opposed to playing football or hockey, which is super good for your long term health!

Admittedly, those two are at an extreme in terms of destroying your body, but they're not alone. Gymnastics leaves people in rough shape in their later years. I'd imagine figure skating and tennis are also pretty hard on you too.

Sports like football and hockey would be even more dangerous if "everyone" was able to use PED's. You're just going to raise the physicality that much more.

Unless football and hockey leagues are randomly testing their athletes year-round, like the UFC does with USADA, it is very safe to assume that everybody is on steroids.

Sounds like an argument for better safety measures in those sports, not fewer.

Boxing too, was made to be more harmful long term by the introduction of safety measures (the gloves). Previously headshots were less frequent to avoid damage to the hands.

With American football there is a paradox; modern safety equipment makes the big hits possible.

Rugby and Australian rules football are good controls.

    > Make it uniform and regulate it and maybe you keep everyone safe. Or not. I don't really care, I build scripts for a living. /shrug

Well, if you don't care, why do you bother to profess an opinion? There are plenty who do care about the well-being of athletes.

I am skeptical, however, that doping will ever get under control unless the pressure behind the doping relents. The rewards in elite sports are perhaps too great. By the time athletes reach their prime mentally, the body is no longer at its peak, and they're desperately trying to compensate to finally reap the rewards of a career of brutal training.

How would you regulate it? If you decide some things are dangerous and forbid their usage then you are back to testing athletes because they might use it anyway if it is still effective.

Over the past couple of dozen years, I've wondered if we could have a second set of competitions where we allowed participants to enhance their performance with the use of drugs.

I admit, my curiosity was piqued by Mutant League Football, but I still think it might be viable. They can maintain separate records and petty much allow anything. One might even make another group that allowed body modifications.

> Honestly PEDs should be legal and regulated in athletics

Well, it is regulated. What is not regulated is that for example steroids permanently modify the amount of myonuclei so that a steroid user will have better long term recovery (rebuilding from reduced muscle state) for decades after usage. Or take EPO: the effect of using EPO is the same as using a compression chamber and has the same dangers (arguably, using EPO is safer than subjecting your body to a outdated compression chamber sourced from the landfill), yet one is allowed and one is forbidden. Then there's steroid usage after injuries (why do teams have a dedicated physician? so he can give people steroids if they stub their little toe).

You can either forbid (on paper) or completely deregulate; "some" regulation will not change very much vs. prohibition.

"Regulating it" means creating new rules. Which would, once again be broken if athletes thought it would help their performance. And you'd end up at square 1, except everybody who was previously clean was now forced to take all the drugs the new rules permitted.

And there's nothing really arbitrary about the rules, or at least no more arbitrary than almost any other rule you can find. Just because you can argue about the exact requirements to become a lawyer in Iowa doesn't mean that my hamster is as good a lawyer as the top graduate of Harvard Law.

I wish there were a sport where anything goes performance enhancement wise. Full-on hulks just roiding out and showing PEAK human performance. Is there anything like this in the world?

There are power lifting federations where they are not tested which can give you some information. PED seems to increase strength between 5-20 percent with most around 10% probably.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-powerlifting-tells...

If you want watch people go all out with AAS, HGH, insulin and all that you can watch modern bodybuilding.

By the way, that's not a 10% increase in individual performance, but rather a 10% increase in relative performance for your weight. People on PEDs will usually move up a weight class from increased muscle mass.

Edit: See here for a really detailed comparison from someone who knows what he's talking about: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/steroids-and-strength-diff...

Imagine if you did have the two classes in an endurance race, with no prize money for the doped up classes. Imagine in cycling if there was Lance and co doing the Tour we know and then another clean race, much like in Learning Mans with motor sport. Lance and co would be the LMP class.

As per motor sport it is obvious what class a car is in, there is no pretending to be the other class.

The testing would be more part of signing up to a given class, everyone would know what everyone was taking whether that be nothing or everything. Much like how in Motorsport you know cylinder count, oil used and so on.

I'm with you on this. I'd be really interested in seeing, for example, an "Open Division" in Track-and-Field, whereby anything goes, up to and including gene modification and cybernetic enhancement.

It would be both a sport and a laboratory for transhumanism. I'd be incredibly interested to see what science came out of it.

There are probably ethical arguments to be made against doing that, but... meh.

PRIDE fighting in Japan explicitly does not test for anything.

they haven't been around for a while. I don't think ONE championship tests, and if they do, it isn't very rigorous.

In MMA the UFC is way way more strict than any of the other orgs. You very rarely see champs or big celebs pulled off card ever like you in the the UFC under USADA testing

Rizin FF[1] is the new PRIDE, in essence. It too has a 'relaxed' stance on PEDs.

[1]: http://www.rizinff.com/en/

And a 'relaxed' stance on stupid matches. Not a fan of the org after the Gabbi Garcia shenanigans

PRIDE has its fair share of preposterous exhibition matches though, to be fair. But no, I'm not a fan either.

World's Strongest Man, Mr. Olympia.

The problem is that the worst coaches exist too. The reality is that you're going to have kids with even worse chronic long term problems after they play through.

That would probably change e.g. a bicycle race into something like Formula 1 racing.

The irony of your statement is that Formula 1 places a huge list of engineering limitations on teams (engine displacement, weight, dimensions, even ECM firmware), and any "performance enhancing" outside of these parameters has historically led to scandals in the sport.

So does cycling. Everything from wheel size, tube profile, saddle angle even down to the basic double diamond shape is regulated.

The entire modern sport of cycling is based around the idea that riders sheltering behind forward team mates or rivals burn much less energy pushing through the air.

Without the rules governing bike design riders would probably gravitate to the use of fully faired recumbent bikes and the team dynamic would be lost. We'd be reduced to what amounts to individual time trials.

This is one reason why we have individual and team time trials on slightly less restricted designs to separate the desciplins.

The UCI is relaxing some of its aero rules, though: http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/uci-set-to-scr...

Isn't air resistance still the limiting factor even on a fully faired recumbent bike? A cooperating team should still handily beat a soloist.