With the Tony Stewart / Kevin Ward Jr. Incident involving the use of illegal drugs by one of the involved participants, is there anyone else out there that would like to see drug testing at local tracks? JMO , but I don't feel that there is a place for any type of mind altering chemicals to be used in this type of sport. There is too much money at stake with the rising cost of equipment.... And also the lives that could be in danger including racers, officials,pit crew, etc.... There are many easy to use tests out there today that give immediate results, including some at Walgreens for $29. In the past there has been talk of drug testing, but there was always the cost factor to do the test. This would appear to be a fairly inexpensive way to start, All for the price of a pit pass. I think a simple formula could be used. Take all of the numbers that were drawn by the drivers at pill draw, and re-draw one of those numbers at the drivers meeting. That way it would be totally random. Some people may not like this, but I would like to see it .
Sounds great, but I believe that some people are luckier than others, Maybe 4 or 5 per night? Then we have the problem that some of that stuff hangs around for a long time some stuff disappears almost instantly.
Then you have to deal with the bleeding heart "Laws and Lawyers".
I despise "Drugs". One big reason I got back into racing was to give my youngest son a reason not to get involved with the Damned stuff.
Maybe the Insurance company's could help the promoters in starting a program in the form of discounts, Legal Documents and Discounts on testing supplies.?
I can remember the story about the guy that was taking the pee test and they informed him he was "pregnant". He went home and kicked his wife out of the house.
Originally Posted by winged and non-winged:
With the Tony Stewart / Kevin Ward Jr. Incident involving the use of illegal drugs by one of the involved participants, is there anyone else out there that would like to see drug testing at local tracks? JMO , but I don't feel that there is a place for any type of mind altering chemicals to be used in this type of sport. There is too much money at stake with the rising cost of equipment.... And also the lives that could be in danger including racers, officials,pit crew, etc.... There are many easy to use tests out there today that give immediate results, including some at Walgreens for $29. In the past there has been talk of drug testing, but there was always the cost factor to do the test. This would appear to be a fairly inexpensive way to start, All for the price of a pit pass. I think a simple formula could be used. Take all of the numbers that were drawn by the drivers at pill draw, and re-draw one of those numbers at the drivers meeting. That way it would be totally random. Some people may not like this, but I would like to see it .
Patrick Budde
Seems to me an idea which is totally out of proportion to the perceived problem. One of my pet peeves is that in our modern culture we often take individual anecdotal events and use them to make often bad policy decisions which lead to negative consequences not anticipated. NASCAR and others can do this because they are a closed shop with lots of resources. Local tracks and yes even some of premier short track sanctioning bodies would find this a tremendous burden. Empirical evidence does not support this idea, nor does a careful reading of the evidence of the Ward/Stewart tragedy.
