Quick, let’s make a list before someone else fails a drug test and the list changes. To keep it manageable, let us confine ourselves to the failures we learned of in the past seven days.

That list goes like this: Anderson Silva, Nick Diaz, Jon Fitch, Hector Lombard.

If we wanted to stretch back even farther, we could include UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones (who, like Diaz, at least had the decency to pop positive for a recreational drug rather than a strictly performance-enhancing one), as well as Ashlee Evans-Smith (who reportedly tested positive for a banned diuretic).

If we wanted to find a UFC pay-per-view event where no one failed a drug test, we’d have to go back to UFC 180 in November, though we’d also have to admit that, with that event taking place in Mexico City, we can’t even be sure what kind of testing took place, or whether it was in any way reliable.

Are you starting to get a sense now for why the UFC might have scrapped plans to run its own extensive, out-of-competition testing program? The slightest little peek behind the curtain tells us that MMA’s drug problem is somehow even worse than we thought. For the UFC to spend its own money to tear that curtain down completely, well, you can imagine why a company coming off a bad year beset by injuries and cancellations might have decided that what it didn’t know wouldn’t hurt it.

The problem is, now we know anyway. The drug test failures are rolling in fast and furious, and it’s not just in the UFC. Even WSOF got in on the act, thanks to Fitch, and Bellator will no doubt feel the heat by association, now that it’s former champ Lombard has an asterisk on his record to go with that suspiciously shredded physique.

The more we learn, the more it seems like you can group fighters into two categories: Those who have failed a drug test, and those who will soon fail a drug test. Want to make these guys really sweat? Walk into their gyms with state athletic commission paperwork and an empty vial for them to pee into. Watch the panic spread.

To tell you the truth, I’m not sure whether we should be depressed that so many MMA fighters are doing drugs or encouraged that so many of them seem to be getting caught lately. Then again, I’m also not sure that we necessarily have to choose between the two, or whether it will even matter what we decide in the end.

We’ve tried so many different approaches in such a short time. We’ve tried caring and not caring. We’ve tried suspending and fining. We tried legalizing certain drugs, via therapeutic-use exemptions for testosterone. We tried shaming fighters into more extensive testing, via public image campaigns aided by voluntary testing programs.

Most recently we’ve tried cracking down on it, via “out-of-competition” testing that surprises fighters a month or so before their bouts. All we’ve learned is that the well of PED users is apparently bottomless, and the more we search its depths the more cynical and jaded we become.

Fighters are doing drugs, and you can understand why they’d be tempted to. This is a sport where training injuries are common, where an injury that keeps you from fighting also keeps you from getting paid, and where a loss earns you half as much money (and edges you one step closer to unemployment) than a win. It’s also a sport where, as we love to tell ourselves every time this happens and we want to feel like one of the cool kids, everyone is on drugs. Or, if it’s a fighter talking, maybe just everyone else.

These are the things we know. What we don’t know is what, if anything, to do about it.

Seems to me there are only two options. Either we have to do more, or else we have to do less. We have to get better at catching cheaters and more career-threateningly severe about punishing them, or else we have to admit to ourselves that we like the sport better this way and stop bumming ourselves out with these tests. We have to decide to care or not care, and we should probably do it soon.

Personally, I vote to care. That’s partially because I think a more stringent, random, extensive testing program, if operated by a reliable and truly independent third party, could eventually scare fighters enough to keep them clean(er). Combine a greater risk of getting caught with a greater punishment once they are caught (if a one-year suspension isn’t enough, make it two; if a 30 percent fine isn’t enough, make it 60, 80, or 100 percent), and the risk-reward calculation that takes place in each fighter’s head might change.

But even if it doesn’t, I still vote to care. That’s because the alternative – giving up and accepting that what we have here is a sport where human chemistry sets trade brain damage for our entertainment, while anyone who can’t afford or would simply prefer not to take these powerful, illegal drugs might as well not even try – just plain sucks.

I don’t want to watch that sport. I don’t want to be in any way complicit in the human wreckage it will inevitably cause. If you do, that’s your choice. If we don’t change something soon, you’ll probably get your wish.

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