Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
November 16, 2005
Carrots and Sticks

Tarik Saleh in the comments to this post points out an article that is offering a different approach to controlling the use of performance enhancing drugs in sports. Don Catlin believes that the current way of policing drugs is flawed, and I agree. Drug enforcers can't keep up with drug creators. What does Catlin want to do about it?

Catlin has no intention of giving up, though. Instead, he's decided to mount a campaign to radically change the way sports go about fighting drugs—an idea that he's revealing publicly for the first time in Outside. Catlin's vision is to replace the current law-enforcement model—in which all athletes are treated as suspects who are monitored and tested to find evidence of specific drug use—with a reward model, one driven by a new voluntary system that, he hopes, would enable officialdom to actually prove that the athletes who take part in it are clean.

The meat of his proposal is on page 7. I find it very interesting that he wants to look at bio markers, and actually administer drugs to a control group of athletes to see how those bio markers change. That way, you can look for changes in an athlete without looking for a specific drug. It's an idea worth thinking about.


Posted by David Pinto at 03:40 PM | Cheating | TrackBack (0)
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