Why we really ban PEDs, and why it's still a battle worth fighting

For something that’s such a pervasive problem, it’s weird how many people seem indifferent or even openly celebratory about the use performance-enhancing drugs in MMA.

To some extent, I get it. The issue is tiresome. It’s not sexy. We like sports in part because they provide an entertaining distraction, and who wants to ruin that by getting hung up on how the sausage is made? After all, this is supposed to be fun, at least for those of us who are paying to watch it. There’s nothing fun about testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratios. Nothing at all.

But recently a couple things made me wonder if we haven’t been having this same argument for so long that we forgot how or why it started. What started it was this opinion piece from Cage Potato’s Jon Mariani, which attempts to play a little game of devil’s advocate by arguing for the legalization of PEDs in MMA.

The argument rests on three points: 1) Allowing drug use will level the playing field since we all know that some fighters are using (some of them legally) and getting away with it, while others suffer as a result of obeying the rules. 2) We can’t completely stop it anyway, so why try? 3) Fans don’t actually care one way or another, as long as there are fun cage fights to watch on TV.

The second and third points are basically an appeal to our collective laziness. If we can’t eradicate a problem entirely, and if a majority of the people who aren’t directly affected by that problem don’t care anyway, these points argue, then we might as well give up. Those aren’t reasons to throw open the flood gates on PEDs – they’re rationalizations.

The first point though, that’s worth examining a little closer. That’s because it accidentally hits on one of the really good reasons in favor of banning PEDs, a reason too often ignored by people attacking all the bad ones.

And, let’s not kid ourselves, there are plenty of bad reasons to ban PEDs. For instance, you could make it out to be a moral issue, which it really isn’t. It’s not like some chemicals or hormones are inherently bad or wrong. There are rules against using them – unless you’re one of the people who gets permission to break the rules (and that’s essentially what therapeutic-use exemptions for synthetic testosterone are). Breaking the rules is cheating, and we all know cheating is bad, but we can’t rest on that alone. Rules change. Look at the evolving stance on recreational marijuana use. Resting on the authority of the rules gets us no closer to figuring out why the rule exists, or whether it’s worth the time and effort to enforce.

But look back at Mariani’s first point, the one that imagines a world where the PED ban is struck down and fighters are free to use whatever they want. As Mariani writes:

The fighters who don’t use PEDs face a clear disadvantage when they step into the cage against opponents who do. There’s also the murky waters of testosterone replacement therapy hall passes, which are being given away like candy. Legalizing PEDs would mean that all fighters could use, which would mean fighters who would like to use but currently don’t because it’s illegal would get on the gear. For the first time since athletic commissions began drug-testing MMA fighters, competition would be truly fair.

Fair in theory, maybe. But what happens when an up-and-coming fighter who can barely afford to keep himself in chicken breasts and protein shakes gets matched up with an old lion (or young dinosaur, for that matter) who can afford the best drugs from the best labs, and his own in-house chemist to keep track of them all? They might have permission to use the same substances, but they don’t have the same access to them.

But then, that’s not so different from what we have now. Those inequalities have always existed in MMA and probably always will. Some guys can afford to hire Mike Dolce to cook their meals and Greg Jackson to work their corners, while others have to make do with organic peanut butter and a friend from the gym to work a water bottle for them. That’s life. The playing field resists our best efforts to level it.

So why ban substances that further exaggerate or alter or even possibly negate these inequities? How about because, as philosophy professor Jacob Beck pointed out in a recent story for The Atlantic, not banning them would eventually result in “a vicious arms race.”

As Beck wrote about the potential effect of legalizing PEDs in Major League Baseball:

The game would become a competition to find the best drugs. Even players who wanted to compete drug free would be coerced into taking PEDs to keep up with their peers. And there is no stable stopping point. If two players are competing for a starting spot on the Yankees, neither player can rest content with yesterday’s pharmaceutical technology. Each one needs to get the latest and greatest PEDs or risk losing his job to the other. And so they’re off to the races, with the finish line set only by the ingenuity of bioengineers.

If you talk to fighters who resist the tide of PEDs, whether it’s the currently legal form or the backroom variety, you’ll hear this a lot. They don’t want to take drugs, but they feel pressured to do it just to keep up.

How could they not? They’re about to be locked in a cage with another man who’s spent the past couple months preparing to hurt them. If that man has been injecting drugs that make him stronger and faster, while also improving his cardio (how many commissions regularly test for EPO, btw?) and his ability to recover between training sessions, things could get bad.

We’re talking broken bones and concussions. We’re also talking another loss on the record, and a paycheck that’s cut in half.

That’s pretty strong incentive to either get out of the game entirely or else get on whatever the other guy is using – maybe even something better, if you can find it.

And that’s where the arms race aspect of PEDs really becomes a problem. Forget the fact that it basically forces fighters who want to stay clean to instead risk their health in brand new ways. Forget the fact that, largely for financial reasons, access to PEDs wouldn’t be equal or fair.

Instead, think about the sport we’d create by allowing rampant and unencumbered drug use. We wouldn’t be watching a competition to determine the superior fighter; we’d be watching a high-stakes science fair with human lab rats. It would quickly become a contest to see who has the better chemistry set, which would absolutely destroy whatever primal beauty and purity there might still be in this stuff.

I don’t know about you, but one of the things I love about MMA is what a simple sport is. One person against another. Minimal equipment or outside interference. A clash of wills and carefully honed abilities. If it turns into one man’s pit crew of scientists against the other guy’s, I doubt we’d like it.

I also doubt we’d like what it does to the athletes themselves. Sure, in the short term they’d be better and faster and stronger. We’ll probably see more spectacular knockouts, not to mention longer careers and quicker turnarounds between fights. We’d also see more brain damage, more ruined bodies, more screwed-up lives.

You think it’s hard on aging fighters now? Wait until they’ve outlived their usefulness to their teams of chemists. Wait until they turn into high-performance cars that are no longer worth the price of the fuel.

That’s why we ban PEDs. It’s because the alternative is to plunge into a world that we wouldn’t actually want to live in. We can either keep fighting them – and hopefully get better at it – or we can give up and let the contest for chemical superiority consume the sport. Personally, I’d rather keep these bouts between the fighters. Let the scientists find something else to do.