Post
by Kevin Thurlow » Fri Oct 09, 2015 9:16 am
" I have to admit that I don't know what a test reading of 400mg means."
Don't feel bad about that - it doesn't mean anything! 400 mg/L or 400 mg/mL would mean something...
In the primitive days of drug testing (say 40 years ago), presence of a banned substance was sufficient to give a "positive" result, because the limits of detection could be quite high, say 0.1 %. As the analytical methods and equipment improved, detection was getting down to 0.000001 % (say) and lower levels could be naturally occurring.
Initially, female athletes were banned for testing positive for testosterone, but this occurs naturally at low levels, so as the science improved, a threshold level had to be applied, to stop false positives.
I haven't found anything in WADA which says what the caffeine figure should be. Note however, caffeine is only on the monitoring list at the moment, so is not banned. (FIDE's document is out of date.)
There are still issues with the WADA list - to make the analysis cheaper, they are banning all different isomers of a drug, and different isomers frequently have completely different properties. So you can be banned for taking something which is completely harmless and offers no help to performance.
WADA allows for therapeutic use exemptions for beta-blockers and various other heart drugs etc.
Strychnine is on the banned list as well - please be very careful if you take this...