Jacob Beck, who dismisses most of the arguments against legalized performance enhancers in sports, fears that ending the ban would “generate a vicious arms race”:
Even players who wanted to compete drug free would be coerced into taking [performance‐enhancing drugs (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.
Increasing the number of home runs is not in itself a good thing. If it were, Bud Selig would order the outfield walls moved in. Moreover, PEDs carry health risks, particularly when there is pressure to adopt the newest and strongest drugs even before they have been properly tested. As I wrote above, a concern about safety is ordinarily not a sufficient reason to ban something from a sport. But in the context of an arms race–in which the only benefit the “arms” provide is relative to one’s competitors–it is.
The Dish 