Do you really think that making performance enhancing drugs legal and "making" players disclose use can possibly work? Why would they disclose something that can't be detected? That would let everyone else know what to take, too. And as PED are discovered, more and more are being made and used. It's naive to think that making them legal would put everyone on a level playing field. And what if some players didn't want to risk their health? They'd be essentially kicked out of the league because of it. Ugh, this idea of making drugs legal is so infuriatingly naive.

If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns?

Maybe make the player pay back everything he's ever made if he is caught using one of these designer drugs? Put it into the mlb contract or something, but allow current mlb players to be grandfathered in so they only lose their earnings from this point forward?

This isn't analagous to guns or normal drugs, really. In theory, the best athlete in a world where no one uses steroids and other PEDs is the best athlete in a world where everyone has equal access to steroids and other PEDs. People only dope because they think everyone else is doping -- it's a prisoner's dilemma thing. If you make the risk real, tangible, severe, and immediate then you can unsettle the prisoner's dilemma and remove the incentive to defect for the great majority of players. There will still be some marginal players doping, but in all likelihood that would not be sufficient to support new designer drug development.

Personally, I'm for the legalisation of recreational drugs because their nonregulation does more to harm users and society than the drugs themselves would do (were they responsibly regulated and used). PEDs are a different case, though, because there's a competitive, financial incentive to use these drugs. They represent an unnecessary risk imposed not only on the major league baseball/football/basketball players who take them but on every high school and college player of any sport who thinks that they just need a little more to get over the top. That's the market for the drug -- the kids who think they can hit it big if they are just a little stronger/faster. If you remove the financial incentive you will deter use. This is important, because currently society is bearing the cost of the (thousands? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of people whose bodies were ruined by abuse (of drugs or food, for that matter) for the purpose of excelling in H.S. athletics.

I couldn't care less if Jason Giambi gets some sort of exotic brain tumor because of his drug use. I'm not going to have to pay for that, in no small part because he is insanely wealthy. For every Giambi who breaks down after hitting it big, though, there are many (hundreds, thousands?) who face similar problems after failing to make it, or even get drafted. I pay for them through my insurance premiums and with my tax dollars.

If we can destroy the incentive to use through a rigorous testing program with "death penalty" type punishments then we can both minimize the cost to society of solving this problem and internalize much of that cost within the relevant industries.