I no longer care much about drugs in baseball.

I did, once.  The Popeye physiques which produced cartoonish home run numbers in the last 10 years bother me, as they remove the context from earlier historic achievements.  I am bothered that minor leaguers, high schoolers and especially impoverished third worlders feel they must endanger their health to have a shot at the show.  

But I am also bothered by the fountains of sanctimony in which MLB, the union, the media and many fans now bathe.  Bonds and Palmeiro are scourges to be not only denied the Hall of Fame, but to be almost literally spat upon and reviled.  McGwire and Sosa, lauded as saviors of the game a few short years ago, are now criminals who should be stripped of fame and fortune, and quite possibly jailed.  But Bonds and McGwire, at least, are rare talents who in my eyes are very much deserving of the company of the others in Cooperstown.  Both of them utterly dominated the game during their primes, for years on end, and as compared to the others of their era (an era awash in performance enhancers), they earned their spots in the Hall.

But beyond this, I am now convinced that it is both impossible and in some ways not even desirable for baseball to try and force itself into cleanliness.  A few reasons:

• Sports have included and in fact embraced cheaters and drug users for all recorded history, from ancient Olympians downing sheep testicles for the testosterone boost to Willie Mays' bottle of red juice.  Believe what you want about Saint Lance, but Diogenes found more honest men with his lantern than there were drug-free top level cyclists in the 1990s.   Baseball has been awash in drugs for decades, a truth fully known by MLB and the union, which makes Selig and Fehr cast as reformers an especially stomach turning sight.
• The line between allowed and banned seems awfully indistinct.  All steroids were allowed for a while, then they were banned but andro was OK.  Creatine and ephedra are OK, but hurt more youngsters than steroids by a long stretch.  Uppers have been a part of MLB for so long that their presence is in fact the benchmark; if their elimination in '06 really happens we may see unparalleled late season slumps (though perhaps more Melhuse ABs).  And the list of likely clubhouse substitutes could actually have as bad or worse health effects than greenies.
• This faded grey line will become nearly invisible in the coming years.  Already available and growing more effective daily are cognitive enhancement drugs, which allow greater focus and less nervousness...think those might help a pitcher needing to hit his spot?  These drugs have legitimate medical purposes, so is a great pitcher afflicted with ADD forced to choose between baseball and a better life?  And that's just now.  Genetic doping is very close, and offers the potential of adding traits like enhanced muscle growth, lung capacity or endurance to athletes more effectively and less detectably than the pharmaceutical counterparts.  Hitters now are getting LASIK eye surgery to enhance vision, in some cases to 20/200 acuity or better.   That's apparently OK...does it stop being OK when you reach 20/400?  Or when someone sporting their Jamie Summers bionic eye comes along who cannot be struck out?  I believe that in 10 or 20 years the current steroid mania will seem quaint, the latter day equivalent of saying "ass" on TV.
• Drug testing is largely a charade, and not just because MLB and MLBPA really don't want a lot of positives.  We've already seen the rise in undetectable synthesized steroid offshoots, further evidence for the near universal belief that the best drug cheats always stay ahead of the testers.  Bonds is reviled, but he never tested positive...he had the misfortune of having grand jury testimony about him leaked.  The ones who get caught tend to be the ones who can't get the good stuff, or the good masking agents.  There are surely well over a hundred current baseball players who've used performance enhancers and haven't been snared through random chance or (like McGwire) poor PR skills.  But we looooove them.  It is downright perverse to speak of making examples of McGwire or Palmeiro when many dozens of their counterparts skate on through.  And it gets even more insidious when the standard becomes, as it has at the Olympic level, the appearance of guilt absent any test proof at all.
•  And to what extent are we willing to go to be sure that our heroes are clean?  Many have noted that the new baseball testing regime won't detect HGH, which requires blood tests.  We could demand those, but that won't stop gene doping, so genetic testing would have to be next.  Is there any level of intrusiveness which goes too far?  After all, these are entertainers, not airline pilots.  
• Test-em-all public rage notwithstanding, there are very few other occupations which not only insist on chemical purity, but which demand testing to prove it.  Most teachers aren't drug tested, nor are most doctors, stockbrokers, or garbage men, though all of those folks touch our lives with far greater impact than do baseball players.  Actors and musicians, perhaps the best analogy to athletes in societal terms, aren't drug tested.  We still watch John Cusack movies and Matthew Perry TV shows despite their widely known drug issues, with little call for their banishment.  And what kind of music halls of fame would exclude the Beatles, Jerry Garcia, or Charlie Parker?
• Prohibition makes things worse.  From going blind on bad 1921 liquor to OD'ing on cut horse tranquilizer, the black market effects from blocking off the (actually or tacitly) authorized supply chain are often worse in health terms than the original problem.  This isn't as likely to be an issue for well-paid big leaguers as it is for high school dreamers or desperate Dominicans.  There is no doubt that if universal steroid testing banished the stuff from sports tonight there would be edge-seeking aspirants shooting the next promised miracle into their eyeballs tomorrow.   And it will kill some of them....it always does.
• I do want the game I love to be played on an even field, with the players whose talent I appreciate able to perform without endangering themselves.  I just don't think the harsh stick of vilification is effective or desirable.  What's more, it'll be less so with each passing year.  In my mind the only solution to performance-enhancing drugs is education and role modeling in the earliest years....by parents, teachers, and coaches, not by pro athletes.   For current players, there have been ground breaking strides in positive peer pressure of late.  Players don't want to feel they have to take steroids, and that message is louder within clubhouses today than it has ever been before.  That's the ticket to lasting change.   The rest is largely self-congratulatory breast-beating to little effect by Congress, MLB, the media and, yes, the fans.  Let the stars of the recent era in the Hall if their accomplishments warrant it, for like it or not, yesterday's stars found their edge just as surely as tomorrow's will.