Shermer on the Doping Dilemma

Michael Shermer, author of Mind of the Market and columnist extraordinaire at Scientific American, delivers an excellent column in this issue on sports doping.

Shermer, it turns out, was a competitive cyclist who observed the rise of doping first-hand. He offers a number of suggestions for fighting illegal doping, such as disqualifying all team members from any event if one team member tests positive.

He doesn’t, however, mention the favorite suggestion here at the Freakonomics blog, namely keeping blood and urine samples around indefinitely and retesting them when new detection technologies become available.