Border guard: Your papers, please!
Hippie: Sorry, man, all I got is a pipe.

—A Child’s Garden of Grass

I’ve heard it said that the French love Jerry Lewis movies. But anti-doping chief Pierre Bordry must be a Cheech and Chong fan, because he seems to be modeling his pursuit of cycling cheats on the work of Sgt. Stedenko.

If salbutamol could put a wanker on a Tour podium, I’d have won eight or nine of the damn’ things by now because I’ve been an asthmatic since childhood. Alas, my various inhalers failed to land me a berth on the U.S. Olympic swimming team back in the Seventies, and a pro cycling contract has been remarkably elusive, too.

In my experience, salbutamol, albuterol and other bronchodilators do not enhance performance so much as make performance possible. Try breathing through a soda straw during a crit sometime, see how you like it. Salbutamol takes an asthmatic’s straw and magically transforms it into the fat pipe that was issued to everyone else as original equipment.

Besides, we’re not even talking about a legitimate doping positive in the case of Oscar Pereiro, since he had a therapeutic-use exemption (TUE) from the UCI. We’re talking about a failure to submit the proper paperwork exacerbated by a dispute between the French anti-doping agency and the UCI over the ubiquity of such exemptions (60 percent of the 105 controlled riders in the 2006 Tour had TUEs for one thing or another).

Forgetting to mail the old 1040EZ before April 15 doesn’t make you a tax cheat. It makes you a knucklehead. And having ignored two testy letters from the French narcs, Pereiro is certainly that, seeing as he’s in line to inherit Floyd Landis’s Tour victory and would have to be considered a favorite to win this year’s race, no matter what's he's inhaling. I’m in his position, I’m replying to everything — pissy letters from Inspector Clouseau, junk mail, spam, skywriting, graffiti and voices in my head.

And if I may be so bold as to speak for the cycling press, how about you dope coppers talk to each other for a change instead of outsourcing your vendettas to the media like The Donald and Rosie O’Donnell? We all want to see to it that cheaters don't prosper, but it helps to have a crime before you start rounding up the usual suspects.

That a national anti-doping agency has a problem with the way the UCI passes out its get-out-of-jail-free cards is still newsworthy. But we’d like to be able to write it up as an intelligent argument about what constitutes doping for performance enhancement, not as the latest in an endless series of Pythonesque bobby stops ("Wot’s all this then?").

Sadly, drug busts have become so commonplace in cycling that the first wire-service story we got simply reported Pereiro’s positive test without mentioning the TUE. Unearthing the qualifying information took a long look at Le Monde’s original, using a machine translation, a well-thumbed dictionary and a dim recollection of elementary-school French, Canadian style.

It flat took my breath away. Happily, I had my inhaler.

A breath of fresh air, or just the same tired old wheezing? Cough it up to us at webletters@insideinc.com. Please include your full name, city and state or nation. — Editor