I heard a proposal today to eliminate drug usage in professional sports. It involves testing. Drug testing is, of course, not new. It has always bothered me because of the privacy issue and false positives. The proposal I heard was that there would be one communal sample, one test for each team immediately after the conclusion of a game. If the communal sample tested positive, the team would forfeit the game. The idea is that the players know who is using drugs and soon the drug users would experience more than a little peer pressure.

When I was a coach I used to have players run laps for a variety of individual silly team infractions for the same reason. Then I had a kid who enjoyed making the team run so I stopped the practice of punishing all for the irresponsibility of one person. Besides, the kids would get enough of that when they grew up and began paying taxes to support a large group of irresponsible people.