I don’t agree with Malcolm Gladwell’s logic in diminishing the importance of satire, but I’m on board with him in this Grantland exchange with Bill Simmons about the hypocrisies in the discussion of performance-enhancing drugs:

“Malcolm Gladwell:

As you know, I’ve had mixed feelings for years about doping. It’s not that I’m in favor of it. It’s just that I’ve never found the standard arguments against doping to be particularly compelling. So professional cyclists take EPO because they can rebuild their red blood cell count, in order to step up their training. I’m against ‘cheating’ when it permits people to take shortcuts. But remind me why I would be against something someone takes because they want to train harder?

Bill Simmons:

Or why blood doping is any different from ‘loading your body with tons of Toradol’ or ‘getting an especially strong cortisone shot’? I don’t know.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Exactly! Or take the so-called ‘treatment/enhancement’ distinction. The idea here is that there is a big difference between the drug that ‘treats’ some kind of illness or medical disorder and one, on the other hand, that ‘enhances’ some preexisting trait. There is a huge amount of literature on treatment/enhancement among scholars, and with good reason. Your health insurance company relies on this distinction, for example, when it decides what to cover. Open heart surgery is treatment. A nose job, which you pay for yourself, is enhancement. This principle is also at the heart of most anti-doping policies. Treatment is OK. Enhancement is illegal. That’s why Tommy John surgery is supposed to be OK. It’s treatment: You blow out your ulnar collateral ligament so you get it fixed.

But wait a minute! The tendons we import into a pitcher’s elbow through Tommy John surgery are way stronger than the ligaments that were there originally. There’s no way Tommy John pitches so well into his early forties without his bionic elbow. Isn’t that enhancement?”