Sanity

There are dark days ahead of anti-drug, anti-steroid puritanism [thanks Barry Bonds, thanks Mike Lupica, thanks G. Gordon Liddy--ed.]. Keep level-headed by remembering these three essential points:
1) If the problem of steroids in sports is simply the existence of an "unfair" competitive advantage, then universal steroid use is a priori just as effective a remedy as universal non-use.
2) Our society has erased the distinction between medicinal and recreational drug use. People who routinely use psychotropic prescription drugs to improve their quality of life are in the same moral category as steroid users. Which is not to say that there's anything wrong with that.
3) The notion that performance-enhancing drugs will ever be eliminated from sports entirely is an impossible dystopian dream.

I made points similar to Andrew Sullivan's way back in July. Ben Johnson is still my hero.

A related point: as Charles Pierce noted last year, those who would give up liberty to protect some imagined sanctity of the record books deserve neither.