Drugs, Ethics, and Gladwell

It's hard to draw a "bright line" between right and wrong, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

Thursday, September 5, 2013, 12:00 am
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On April 21, 1980, Rosie Ruiz broke the tape in the Boston Marathon with a time of 2:31:56, a new course record and the third-fastest time ever run. We now know that she accomplished this feat by taking the subway, but as far as I can tell from Malcolm Gladwell's article in the latest New Yorker, we should be applauding her application of "science, intelligence, and sheer will" to get to the finish line first, rather than quibbling about rules she may have broken.

I don't mean to turn into a Gladwell stalker (this being the second time in as many weeks that I've felt compelled to rant in response to a Gladwell piece), but his argument that the inherently unequal playing field created by differences in natural talent means that performance-enhancing drugs should be allowed in sport is too baffling to leave alone.


During my competitive career, the debate about drugs seemed very simple to me. There was a list of rules that governed what athletes were and weren't allowed to do; I would do everything within my power to get faster within the rules, and I wouldn't do anything that was against the rules. That's still the framework I use to judge those athletes found guilty of breaking the rules. So when Gladwell writes: "Maybe Alex Rodriguez looks at Tommy John—and at the fact that at least a third of current major-league pitchers have had the same surgery—and is genuinely baffled about why baseball has drawn a bright moral line between the performance-enhancing products of modern endocrinology and those offered by orthopedics," I don't find that particularly compelling. I'm not interested in whether Rodriguez was baffled, as long as he understood the rules. Why are corked and aluminum bats banned? Why are spitballs banned? Why don't trees touch the sky? These are all good questions, but they're not excuses for making up your own rules.

That being said, I understand that it's also worth moving beyond "how things are" to debate "how things ought to be." Way back in 2008, ethicist Thomas Murray of the Hasting Center created this briefing document on the ethical debate around drugs in sport. It's an excellent summary of the main arguments on either side, and it makes clear that formulating unambiguous, easily defended rules isn't easy.

One of the arguments Murray addresses is the one Gladwell makes:

If the point of an endurance sport like cross-country skiing is to see how rapidly you can cover long distances without collapsing, then anything that allows you to go harder and longer would improve your performance, including EPO. Why doesn’t Nordic skiing welcome EPO the same way it welcomes synthetic fiber garments and faster skis? To some critics, Nordic skiing is being inconsistent. If the point of the sport is to go faster, then EPO should be treated just like better ski waxes, the critic may argue.

But most aficionados of sport persist in seeing a difference between using drugs to enhance performance and employing other means to the same end. Intensive training, smart tactics, dedication, studying your competitors—all these can improve one’s performance and all of them are regarded as admirable ways of perfecting your natural talents.

Those natural talents are, of course, allotted in vastly uneven measure among us all. Some commentators see this as a form of injustice and performance-enhancing drugs as a remedy for nature’s cruel inequalities. Why should the race go to the swift? What if I’m a clumsy, slow-footed slogger? Shouldn’t I have an equal opportunity to get to the finish line first? If anabolic steroids or stimulants can balance out the uneven shares of talent given by birth, shouldn’t I be allowed to use them? Then victory will belong to the one who trains the hardest perhaps, talent be damned—or neutralized, at least.

As Murray goes on to say, such questions force us to ask ourselves: What do we value in sport? Gladwell floats "a vision of sports in which the object of competition is to use science, intelligence, and sheer will to conquer natural difference." To me, that sounds a lot like the old Saturday Night Live sketch about the All-Drug Olympics. Murray's answer, when I interviewed him for an article about the role of technology in sport a few years ago, was that what we're really looking for is the "virtuous perfection of natural talent." In other words, part of what we're marvelling over when we watch sports is the astonishing natural abilities displayed by world-class athletes, along with the hard work it takes to "perfect" those abilities -- in a virtuous way.

So what's "virtuous"? That's a harder question. Gladwell juxtaposes Tommy John surgery with blood-doping, and there are plenty of other possible examples. What's the precise difference between increasing your red blood cell count by being born at altitude, moving to altitude, sleeping in an altitude tent, reinfusing your own blood, taking EPO...? Where do you draw the line? What about caffeine and creatine, powerful exogenous performance-enhancers that are nonetheless permitted by WADA mainly because they're essentially impossible to regulate, not because they're qualitatively different from other banned performance-enhancers?

The main point I wanted to make here is that the fact that it's difficult to draw a "bright moral line" doesn't mean that it's better to have no line at all. I think most people agree that we don't want the All-Drug Olympics -- that is, there need to be some rules. (For those who don't think there should be any rules, I'd point out that sport is a continuum from Little League to the Majors: don't imagine that the bottom rungs can be fully insulated from the effects of changes at the top.) If we agree that there should be rules, then we're no longer arguing about whether athletes should be able to make up their own definition of cheating -- we're just arguing about where, exactly, that line should be drawn.

On that note, if Malcolm Gladwell wants to argue that Tommy John surgery should be illegal, or that autologous blood doping should be legal, then let's have that debate. More specifically, let's look at the specific pros and cons of legalizing or banning those specific techniques. There are reasonable arguments on both sides; these are the debates tackled on a regular basis by medical, sports, and ethics experts (including Thomas Murray) to formulate and update WADA's rules. The argument that's not worth having is about whether rules should be abolished entirely, or whether athletes should be able to decide for themselves which rules to follow. That sort of proposal makes for a provocative thought experiment (and an always-popular headline), but makes no sense if you try to follow it to its logical conclusion.