Written by Jonah Keri at CBSSports.com
Welcome to this week’s edition of Keri The 10! As always, we’ll go around the majors with 10 stories that caught our eye from the past seven days. There will be numbers, and occasionally, memes. As always, we will have fun.
1. In the battle against PEDs, there’s now only one logical course of action …
Legalize everything.
Moralizing, shaming offenders, making penalties stiffer — none of these approaches will ever fully stamp out performance-enhancing drug use. Athletes will always look for an edge. They’ll always try to find loopholes, ways to avoid positive tests, ways to improve on the field by ingesting anything that will do the trick. The only thing we know that prohibitions do is push athletes to find little helpers on the black market.
Take the case of Starling Marte . The Pirates All-Star outfielder tested positive for a substance called nandrolone. Why is that noteworthy? As VICE Sports writer Aaron Gordon explained, no player in his right mind would ever knowingly take nandrolone, because it stays in the body for much longer than other performance-enhancing substances, and because it gets detected at “ultratrace” levels. In his story, Gordon interviewed Victor Conte, the founder of the infamous BALCO lab. As Gordon wrote:
“Conte said nandrolone is often detected when an athlete is taking another banned substance — likely testosterone — that was manufactured in an illicit laboratory that doesn’t adhere to strict quality standards…”
Marte getting suspended for half a season is a mild drawback compared to another potential effect of black-market drug distribution: huge and extremely harmful side effects. Without the protections that come from reputable, well-funded labs, athletes diving into PED use risk doing serious harm to their health, moral implications aside.
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