A Drug Hits Cycling Before It Hits the Market
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The efficacy of all this depends on having a rock-solid chain-of-custody for the blood samples-- just like evidence used for a criminal court. Not easy.
The scary thing is had Armstrong not tried to come back to cycling the last time he would've been in the clear. The reason Landis turned him in was Armstrong refused to let him on his team.
Which reminds me: Mr. Landis still owes me $35 for that book of his that I bought. [0] His book did highlight what an unprofessional ass Dick Pound (head of WADA at the time) is, and how loosy-goosy some of the testing was. But in the end, Floyd doped just like the rest of them and deserved to be stripped of his TdF title. Once Landis' story broke, I can say that's the point at which I just gave up on pro cycling. That's when it all became clear that cheating also includes lots of lying, and regrets only come when they're caught. I gave the whole lot the benefit of the doubt, and now feel foolish for doing so. I'm a former Cat 2 racer, USAC race official, paid loads of money for pay-per-view races, loads of money on gear; now I don't do any of it, and if I watch sports on TV it's MotoGP. Sports participation is now trail running, where the most insidious drug I see evidence of is the cloud of pot smoke rolling out of some dude's car right before the start.
If Armstrong had just left well enough alone, as you mention, he would have walked away a hero. But I'm guessing his cockiness caught up with him, and he just didn't know when to leave well enough alone, convinced that if he hadn't been caught before he'd continue to not get caught. Which seems to be the downfall of many criminals that get caught.
And as unprofessional as Dick Pound's behavior might have been, it turns out he was right. That's where I'm conflicted. Not "innocent until proven guilty", but "I'm convinced you're guilty, and whether you're guilty or not I'm going to dig until I find dirt". But he was right, at least this time.
Proof is the "alleged" steroid use of Ryan Braun - the Major League Baseball case where the guy in charge of the sample left it in his home over the weekend and Braun got off on this technicality
For the purposes of a drug test, your requirements are even looser. I don't see why you'd need or care about lysing your cells. A test is only going to be screening for small molecules, so destroying organelles and lysing cells should be largely irrelevant.
AFAIK, even flash frozen and gently thawed prokaryotes do not have 100% survive rate and eukaryote survive rate is considerably lower. My comment revolves around the idea that biochemical reactions have pretty strict requirements on conditions for happening at all, while chemical reactions are much looser in this regard. Even 99.999% survivability calls for scientific research on structural/biochemical/chemical change prior to using such techniques for anything touching legal system with anything shorter than ten foot pole. IMHO. Happy to be corrected.
I guess this happens to millions of people every day, ordering drugs online through the internet.
I'm assuming this is just an NY Times shorthand for saying the drug isn't approved for human use anywhere and wasn't made in pharmaceutical grade facility.
edit: qualified for "medical" drugs (those meant for medical conditions) instead of enhancement-performing drugs
What's the point of the competition when a good portion of the top athletes are doping? It's not a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt.
The real spectacle is now between the athletes, regulators, lawyers, coaches. I see no romance/art in watching them chase money and evidence around.
I'm a transhumanist, so I just want to see the most impressive things the human body can pull off, and that includes the use of chemical enhancement..
This may be a ship-of-theseus sort of question with no widely agreed upon answer, but at some point doesn't it stop being what the human body can pull off if you modify it enough?
They chase money and evidence around precisely because people like you will stop caring if they can't prevent doping. You draw a (very arbitrary) line between 'natural' and 'unnatural' athletes, and you create a market for goon squads to hunt down the unnaturals to preserve the purity of the culture.
It never was a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt. It's also a contest of means, luck, money, food, biology, and genetics. Even without the doping.
It's especially visible in running, where sprinting world records never last long thanks to new knowledge of nutrition.
wait, it was just the introduction of EPO.
I'm arguing that athletes who perform in games and competitions must follow the rules of these games and competitions, or else what is the point of having the structured organization of a sport? No one would care about the Tour de France if it wasn't assumed that the athletes were all following the same set of rules. Athletes who dope should play in their own league, with their own set of rules.
I agree: the line between different performance enhancing technologies is blurred. I'm not trying to pass judgment on whether taking steroids is more or less "wrong" than following a high-protein diet.
All I can comment on is my decline in interest given the shaky boundaries and clearly unethical actions of the top layer of these sports.
On the other hand, if you're going to pay them so much to win, it will naturally be worth the risk to lie and cheat to do it.
Unfortunately I am but one individual in the greater market of people who determine athlete salary by attending games, sitting in front of the TV, and buying endorsed products.
I do love to watch a good old Federer v Djokovic match every once in a while though ;)
Even in the case where you were to break things out into a doping/vs. non-doping leagues, I have a feeling that in the ultra-competitive world of top athletes, there would be a temptation to get an edge in the non-doping league by similar means as are used today thus buying nothing (except, perhaps, an additional league of super-human athletes who I suspect would get more recognition, fame, and money than their counterparts and therefore push more athletes into a doping arms-race).
David Millar's autobiography goes into some detail about it.
Someone saying "take this blood transfusion or inject this 'recover' syringe or you're out of a job" to a young athlete, far from home, is a scary thought.
"Natural" forms of athletic enhancement (pre puberty rigorous training) lead to stunted growth from the stress and impact placed on growth plates. What happens when the only way to get ahead is to gamble with Human Growth Hormone and steroids pre puberty?
I mean if they're making stuff that is designed to alter your production of red blood cells, is that 2% of stuff likely to be inert or be stuff that has an effect on you?
What's the usual purity percentage of say, OTC aspirin?
It's not FDA approved and probably made in lab with the same stringent quality controls as the clandestine ones in China pumping out similar things.
The 98% purity thing shows that they weren't willing to put in the extra investment to run enough solvent washes / whatever to not poison their customers.
Then why does it come in pill form? And why do they only sell it to researchers - including those doing clinical trials?
It is available to researchers as they are able to use it in non-human assays, experiments and studies.
[1] https://www.caymanchem.com/app/template/Product.vm/catalog/1...
There really aren't other offerings online for this chemical and I doubt that the suppliers are doing back alley deals with research teams in the US.
Someone in the supply chain knows exactly what this compound is for. They know people are buying it to be consumed. They commissioned a foreign lab to have it produced. They could have found a pharm grade lab to produce it. They didn't, because the margins are high on quasi-illicit substances produced in Chinese labs.
It was a cheap synthesis to get tons of the stuff on the market quickly with a huge margin. It's certainly meant for human use.
e.g. https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201008170449...
This is mostly deliberate, but acetic acid is a common contaminent in the manufacturing process.
Peptide drugs will also typically be cyclized with sulfur bridges, so they don't get destroyed by proteases before doing whatever it is they are supposed to do. They're also pH adjusted.
So once the initial synthesis is complete, your purity may be pretty low. You then run your mix of desired molecule plus oodles of incomplete reaction products through a HPLC column a few times, and take the fraction that has the right molecular weight, until the desired purity is reached.
After doing so, whatever is left is going to be a high fraction of the molecule you want, and a tiny fraction of coincidentally similar peptides, which will probably be inert in the body and quickly destroyed by proteases.
If the drug is from an organic synthesis, the 2% impurity is going to depend on the synthesis processes used. It might be leftover catalyst that can't easily be separated, or stereoisomers, or incomplete reaction products.
For regular pharmaceuticals, that 2% is likely to be harmless. For home-made krokodil, that 2% could cause your skin to rot and fall off. Chinese biochem labs will send you pretty much anything you ask for, but you'll have to do your own QC on it. You're not going to win a consumer protection lawsuit there, and the only weapon you have for compliance is to stop paying them and switch labs.
An OTC aspirin tablet is going to start with x% pure acetylsalicylic acid. The dosage mass per tablet is added. Then inert, known-safe binders and fillers are added, like cellulose and dextrose, to make the dosage amount more convenient for handling and swallowing. The original impurity amount is swamped by fillers, so you really just need to know the percentage to determine what mass of the powder you need to add per tablet to get the correct dose. If your aspirin starts at 50% pure, you add 300 mg of it to get a 150 mg dose. Then you add 700 mg of filler to make a 1 g tablet. If it's 98% pure, you add 153 g to get a 150 mg dose, and add 847 mg of filler. The only concern would be whether the original impurities are more dangerous than the filler you use.
Typical impurities for synthesized acetylsalicylic acid are salicylic acid (unreacted starting reagent), ortho- or para- substituted salicylic acid, which may be esterified, acetic acid, salicylic acid ester dimer, and ethyl salicylate. The impurities will mostly be salicylic acid and vinegar. Salicylic acid is a metabolite of aspirin anyway, and is also antipyretic, analgesic, anti-imflammatory. A lower-purity batch of aspirin probably won't be dangerous to use. But for different drugs, the impurities will be different! If the impurity could be a deadly poison, there's a big difference between 98% pure and 90% pure.
Of course, it depends on what the impurity is. If it's ethanol, you can have a few percent. If it's a suspected carcinogen, the level might be in ppm.
Good to see they're developing the means to uncover these new drugs before they become widely used.
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/manufacturer-helped-wada-wit...
Alongside track and field athletes, cyclists are the most tested athletes in any sport, and are subject to three core testing regimes.
Firstly, cyclists are subject to in-competition testing. The winner of any race (or the stage of a race) and a random sample of other riders will be subject to blood or urine tests.
Secondly, the whereabouts program requires cyclists to notify the authorities of their location every day to facilitate out-of-competition testing. Athletes are randomly sampled, with extra scrutiny paid to the strongest performers.
Thirdly, the biological passport scheme creates a long-term profile of a rider's physiology, to track changes in markers like testosterone/epitestosterone ratio and hematocrit that may indicate the use of performance enhancing drugs or methods. A sudden change in any of these markers or deviation outside normal ranges is grounds for sanctioning.
In all tests, two samples are taken to safeguard against anomalous measurements or failures in the chain of custody. A portion of both samples is stored indefinitely, to facilitate retroactive testing if new drugs or methods are discovered.
https://wada-main-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/resources/files/wada...