Yet our achievements are never solely our own. Racers do not design and build their own bicycles, batters with poor eyesight do not fashion their own corrective lenses, and no athlete is responsible for the education of his or her coach. Individual achievement is always set against a backdrop of community assistance. So why not add your pharmacist to the long list of people who make it possible for you to succeed? If this seems strange, recall that Metta World Peace (then known as Ron Artest) publicly thanked his psychiatrist when he and the Lakers won the NBA finals in 2010.

Reason No. 6: PEDs make success too easy.

Even if PEDs don't sap all responsibility from your achievements, you might worry that they make success too easy. As Nietzsche observed in his famous discussion of the will to power, much of the value in an activity consists in overcoming obstacles. There is nothing good in and of itself about hitting a home run; rather, what's good about hitting a home run is that it's usually the culmination of a long process of hard work that involves years of honing one's talents, thousands of swings in the batting cage, endless hours in the weight room, and a careful diet.

Yet this worry betrays a misunderstanding of PEDs. They're not magic pills that instantly transform you into Babe Ruth. Athletes who take steroids still need to spend years training. PEDs accelerate the rewards of hard work; they don't substitute for it.

Reason No. 7: PEDs generate a vicious arms race.

This is what I believe is the real problem with PEDs in sports.

Traditionally, an arms race occurs between nations when they compete to amass superior weaponry. During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a nuclear arms race. Each nation built up its own stockpile of nuclear weapons to counter the threat from the other. As political scientists have noted, a traditional arms race is vicious since both nations would surely be better off never amassing arms in the first place. But once started, an arms race quickly runs out of control and everyone suffers.

Sports are competitive enterprises. Not just anyone can play for the Yankees or the Red Sox; you need to be better than almost everyone else. As a result, sports encourage an arms race--not of literal weaponry, but of equipment, training methods, and anything else that provides a competitive advantage. Sometimes this arms race is virtuous, as when it encourages everyone to practice more and train harder.

Other times, however, it is like a traditional arms race in that everyone winds up worse off than if the arms race had never begun. In the Beijing Olympics, swimmers who adopted a polyurethane body suit that was designed with the help of NASA won a disproportionate number of medals and shattered world records. Swimmers who did not have the suit were left in their wakes. An arms race was on. Swimming became as much about swimwear technology as about an effective stroke. Collectively, swimmers recognized that the arms race was vicious. The suits cost over $500 each, could be worn only a limited number of times, and took over 30 minutes to put on. While they made everyone faster, that hardly seemed relevant. If the point were to traverse the pool as quickly as possible, boats would be used. Swimming races are supposed to showcase swimming, not NASA's engineering. Everyone was clearly better off without the suits, yet so long as they were permitted each swimmer needed one to compete effectively. Recognizing the absurdity, the sport's governing body, FINA, wisely banned the suits in 2009.