These guys are professional sportsmen &, moreover, adults. The ultimate responsibility for what goes in their bodies is their own. If you knew you might lose your means of support for two years (or one year, the length of the ban isn't as important as its uniformity) I reckon you'd be extra careful.
Yeah look, I can't disagree with that at all. These guys are well appraised of the risks they need to avoid but I'm just not a fan of mandatory penalties in general. As far as I'm concerned, they are just as much open to manipulation as discretionary penalties.
For example (and I hate to throw my 'expertise' around here yet again but these days I'm a crime pattern analyst for the ***ual Crime Investigation Branch of SA Police), but say an athlete has his/her drink spiked at a bar with a steroid or another performance-enhacing drug. Now although not being administered direct into the bloodstream, you'd imagine some of it would still get there (I was a chemist so my biology isn't great and I'm not totally sure of this; Deja Moo?). Now assuming that's correct, assume a drug test happens the next day.
Who would believe the 'my drink was spiked' argument? In any investigation, previous propensity for doing this sort of thing would be taken into account (if there's no evidence that the person in question had done this before, such as used needles found in their room, that would weaken the case for a regular IV user) but in a situation with a mandatory 2-year penalty for just finding this drug in blood samples, for example, these factors would not need to be taken into account. The arbitrator would be compelled to apply the mandatory penalty no matter what the mitigating circumstances.
Now how fair is that? Given that this is a low-percentage situation and that I don't have any idea how well various performance-enhancing drugs would lend themselves towards being delivered in a drink-spiking situation, it doesn't seem totally fair to just ban someone outright when there might be evidence to indicate that they might be in the clear but which would have to be ignored in this sort of legal situation (much like several cases in the NT).
I dunno, am I talking out of my rectum people?