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Once again, NFL’s PED testing policy failed to catch a deliberate fraudster.
Cardinals successor brand manager DeAndre Hopkins has issued a cursory statement about the brand’s management, showing that like almost every other player punished for violating the PED, Hopkins did not take the PED intentionally.
“DeAndre and everyone who works with him are completely shocked by this discovery because he is extremely diligent about what he puts into his body,” Doug Sanders said in a test message, copied, pasted and tweeted by ESPN’s Adam Shefter.
Sanders’ text insists that Hopkins “is committed to demonstrating that he has not deliberately taken a banned substance” and that they are “currently testing every product he has used to see how this could have happened.”
The protection of the “spiked supplement” is hardly unusual. But the NFL and NFL Players’ Association have approved a list of add-ons to avoid such accidents. Players who wish to refrain from using spiked supplements may accept supplements from the approved list.
Any player who has ever taken a positive PED test can claim to have taken it by accident. This is one of the hidden advantages of the rule of strict liability for the presence of PED as a result of the test. It doesn’t matter if you picked it up by accident, so the player can always say he did it.
With very few exceptions, they almost always do.
This does not mean that any of them are lying. If everyone is telling the truth, it means that there are many boys who deliberately take PED and never catch it.
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