99% of professional athletes are or were on steroids at some point, it's not to gain an advantage, its simply to level the playing field, if you want to be competitive at the highest level at any sport you need to take some sort of ped, also how the fuck do fighters train 2-3 times a day hard without steroids, it is simply impossible for your body to sustain that type of stress if you're natural, try training 3 times a day for a week and report back with your findings. Big waste of money if you ask me, all your favorite sport icons are on roids, Usain Bolt, Ronaldo, Anthony Joshua, Wilder, GSP... the list goes on. Let them roid the fuck out, it makes things more interesting for the fans.
I've been thinking about this for years and have come to the conclusion that now that there is a regulatory apparatus in place, with state athletic commissions etc., it's a jobs program and will never go away. Sort of like how there are still computer programmers officially working for the government to deal with the Y2K problem. This jobs program will not go away even if:
1) no amount of testing rigor will ever stop, but only make more challenging, the use of PEDs, and this is widely known by all parties involved or even demonstrated in some experimental way
2) it is shown that PEDs aren't all that dangerous, especially in the context of a sport where concussions and joint damage are de rigueur. Obviously there is an enormous difference between taking growth hormone, taking anabolic steroids, and injecting your own RBCs back into your blood, etc. etc. etc. "PEDs" as being "dangerous" is just one oversimplification of this whole debate
I did grad school in an endocrinology lab and from my perspective you cannot really define a clear line of what is a "PED" vs. things that would be considered supplements or simply nutrition. I remember making the argument years ago that it's entirely possible someone with a tumor on their pituitary (like Bigfoot Silva had) or testes, could produce levels of hormone that would make them look like they were taking exogenous hormone. What would the response to that be? Maybe a genetic mutation in sex hormone-binding globulin, or the enzyme that metabolizes steroids, that results in several times more steroid signaling occur in at the cell level. Should they be prevented from fighting?
Let's say for example in the future there is some technology that allows an athlete to have steroid-taking levels of testosterone without actually injecting it or a synthetic version. For the sake of the argument we can imagine some future technique where a mixture of cholesterol (the precursor to all steroids, and also of course a substance found in nearly every animal food) with red light and sonic vibrations on the testes causes an output of testosterone that is about the same as what someone has in their blood during a cycle. Would that technique, the use of red light and a sonic device (like a high frequency massager) and consuming high levels of cholesterol, be made illegal?
We are living in a time with a certain level of biomedical technology available to athletes and to regulatory bodies, such that everyone that knows anything about it kind of knows that many/most take something, almost no one takes nothing illegal, and only a small fraction get caught or get caught more than once. As the technology changes, these circumstances will change. There may be a time very near in the future when an at-home mutagenesis kit can produce synthetic steroids on demand that add small molecular groups that hardly affect the efficacy of the substance but fuck with the testing (which almost always looks at downstream metabolites) to the point where it's functionally impossible to test for things. And perhaps that kind of arms race between the dopers and the testers could end up being more dangerous than simply letting dudes use good ole natural versions of this stuff.
I think the best thing to do in the real world we actually live in, not some fairytale world where you can expect multimillion dollar athletes to want to be honest over winning and where the "experts" (state bureaucrats) are smarter than the doctors these athletes pay, is to just give up and let it be a street cred thing where everyone pretty much knows which fighters use what and people like the Diaz brothers and BJ Penn or whatever can call everyone out for being juice monkeys and feel morally superior.
This is all speculation, but everyone should know that everyone's opinion on this is speculation. No one knows what future technology will bring, and modern government bureaucrats and the agencies they hire are notoriously several steps behind the fields they are supposed to police, whether it's banking/finance, sports PEDs, the energy sector, pharma, etc. And it's not always that they are behind in the sense that they can't keep up with bad things companies are doing, sometimes they are behind in the sense that they regulate or punish companies doing something that isn't actually bad just to look busy while something much worse is going on under their noses, like a traffic giving you a ticket for going 10 mph over the limit and a mile down the road someone is getting murdered in their car.