Who can forget the sight of Ben Johnson storming down the track in the 100m final at Seoul in 1988? His time of 9.79secs took at staggering 0.14secs off the standing world record. Of course, history tells us that Ben was chemically enhanced, but the performance was electrifying and it raised the question: "What are human beings really capable of?"

Despite the self-righteous bleating of Dick Pound and the rest of the WADA killjoys, drug cheats have always managed to stay one step ahead of the testers and it is only the less intelligent or unknowing who are caught out these days. The Chinese ‘women’s’ swimming team were not caught by testing although their manly physiques on display at the 1994 Rome World Championships did raise some questions. They were caught out two years later, but their World Championship medals stand.

Similarly, Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery were never caught despite being linked to the infamous BALCO laboratory and while they cannot be accused of doping, it is interesting to look at their performances post-Sydney Olympics. Michelle Smith, the Irish swimmer, came from nowhere to claim four Olympic medals in Atlanta, but was subsequently caught out by adding whisky to her urine sample and banned, but never caught with banned substances in her system. Even the great Carl Lewis, 'Mr Clean', was implicated for using stimulants in the lead-up to the Seoul Olympics, but was never officially accused due to the cover-up by the US Olympic Committee. A cover-up that continued until at least 2000, with Jerome Young allowed to compete despite testing positive for steroids the previous year.

Cyclist Floyd Landis’s positive test came as a bit of a surprise, although his recovery, after blowing up in the mountains, was nothing short of miraculous. On the surface it seems like a stupid way to get caught. Testosterone isn’t a fast-acting drug, so on that ground his protests of innocence have some merit. Whether his positive test was as a result of blood doping, or any one of a number of other possibilities, is irrelevant - the damage that this will do professional cycling will be immense. This year's Tour de France will be forever tainted by drug accusations, not only by Landis’s transgression, but by the loss of a large number of front runners to drug accusations before the race even started. Sadly, this year will not stand out as an exception, with a drug cloud hanging over the race since the 60s.

Justin Gatlin, another world-record holder, also tested positive recently for excessive amounts of testosterone. Like everyone who gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar, he issued immediate denials and very earnestly claims to have no knowledge of how the stuff got into his system. He is quoted as saying: “I cannot account for these results, because I have never knowingly used any banned substance or authorised anyone to administer such a substance to me." This, despite a ban for amphetamine use in 2001, which was later overturned because it was allegedly part of his ADD medication (surely attention deficit isn’t a problem for someone in a 100m sprint – it only takes 10 seconds!). As I said, it’s only the less-than-intelligent or unknowing who get caught. You can draw your own conclusions as to which category he’s in.
Now, for the first time in cricket history, two Pakistani players have been caught using performance-enhancing drugs. Not just any drugs, either. Shoaib Akhtar and Asif used nandralone, the drug of choice for really committed, but very stupid, drug cheats. Sure, others have been suspended for drug use, including Shane Warne for his fat pill, but all other cases have been for dope or Colombian marching powder. That the Pakistan Cricket Board decided to thumb their noses at the WADA regulations on bans for drug use speaks volumes for their attitude to the laws of the game.

No-one did it better than the East Germans, though. The use of testosterone was so prevalent under Ewald and Hoppner that one of their stars, shot putter Heidi Krieger, ended up having a sex change and is now a bloke. The clandestine doping of children by their system yielded tremendous results at the time, but the impact on the athletes was to continue long after they finished competing. The drugs were administered without the knowledge of the athletes and have led to a myriad of problems including kidney and liver failure, cancers, sexual dysfunction, depression and other psychiatric damage. It has been estimated that up to 10,000 former East German athletes may have been affected.

I, too, have fallen prey to taking performance-enhancing drugs. I played half of my football career on Stemetil (for nausea) and Panadeine (for the headache) to allow me to make it onto the field after turning up drunk or severely hungover. You cannot overestimate the impact that being forced to your knees to vomit on centre wing can have on your ability to play football; therefore anything that can prevent it must be performance-enhancing. Along the same lines, painkilling injections are routinely and openly used by athletes the world over and massive amounts of technology are used to diagnose and treat injuries, so why not remove all of the restrictions? And no-one can convince me that Zinadine Zidane wasn’t on drugs when he chose to headbutt an opponent in the World Cup final.

It has been argued that just because some get away with cheating, that is not reason enough to make it legal. The analogy being if some people get away with stealing, the answer isn’t to make theft legal. While that may be true, if nearly everyone is stealing and getting away with it, then perhaps just keeping it illegal isn’t fixing the problem, either. If we argue that making performance-enhancing drugs legal will lead to a generation of athletes with drug-related health problems, like the East Germans, then it isn’t being monitored properly. Regular testing and health monitoring, coupled with education programmes, can wipe out most of these effects. The problem with the East German approach is the lack of restraint and control; nothing was off limits and Christ knows how many of the disasters were buried somewhere in a shallow grave. That’s the problem with doing it undercover and without independent scrutiny - it forces the athletes to experiment with untried and untested pharmaceuticals in the quest to remain undetected.

Besides, many, if not all, professional athletes will suffer health problems later in life that are a direct result of their sport. The results range from the tragic punch-drunk boxers who can barely communicate to footballers who live out their life in constant pain. Any suggestion that a drug-free career leaves you in perfect health can quickly be put to rest by seeing Muhammad Ali or listening to Dermott Brereton. Even competitors in seemingly gentler sports, such as swimming, suffer through massive amounts of pain, often requiring surgery to stay at the top. Professional athletes, it seems, are willing to make any sacrifice. Why get in their way?

The current constraints on WADA’s regulatory abilities are a major part of the problem. If you really want to stick with the ban approach, then get serious. Stop relying on local controlling bodies to do the enforcing when in many cases it is not in their interest to expose cheats, or if they do they are pretty bloody soft on them. There is also the problem of the two levels of punishment. There should be no leniency for the first offence. Ben Johnson got a two-year ban for blatantly cheating on the biggest stage in world sport. If you are going to be serious, catch them once and ban them for life, strip them of any records, medals or whatever that they have ever achieved. Make it known that if they get caught out it will destroy their life, then the risks may outweigh the rewards and it might have an impact.

If they can’t take it seriously, then bring drug use out of the closet and into a controlled environment and let's see what the human body is capable of. Professional sport is already well past the point where we can claim it to be clean, anyway. If we allow athletes to make informed decisions about the effects that the drugs will have on their body and they can be monitored to minimise the peripheral health effects, then why not? There are people all over the planet who are willing to sacrifice everything for fame and fortune, which is why we have Big Brother on TV. Of course, it will need to be regulated. A minimum age of 16 for informed consent, a maximum testicle size for female athletes etc. But if we can take humans to the limits of their abilities, it will be a level playing field for all and the only losers will be those dumb enough to take part.