Wrestling is Vince McMahon's business, which makes it his business whether he tests for drugs or not. But after all the deaths, and now after a pair of murders and a suicide, it's bad business to tolerate drug use in wrestling. That includes steroids, a substance that helped make the WWF in the 1980s but nearly brought it down in the 1990s.

Painkillers help wrestlers endure 300-day annual travel schedules. Steroids help them create superhero facades, pictures of health which mask the ill-health beneath. Other chemicals help them cope with the instant fame, familial separation, and other job stresses. But their use by so many high-profile wrestlers who have committed suicide, overdosed, suffered life-ending heart attacks, and now murdered, makes it important for Vince McMahon to institute a strict drug-testing policy. Why he--the guy who boldly admitted wrestling to be a work to make it mainstream entertainment--hasn't done this already is confusing.

I don't blame drugs for the murders-suicide. I blame Chris Benoit. Millions of people use drugs, after all, without murdering their wives and children. And before widespread drug use, sober--chemically speaking--people occasionally murdered their families. But with steroids found in Benoit's house, and the utter weirdness of the three killings, staggered as they were over a weekend, the suspicion of chemicals influencing judgment is strong. Drug use makes such murderous rages more prevalent. Drugs, even more so, methinks, than the easy availability of handguns, contributes to violent crime.

On the other hand, Benoit was coherent enough to send text messages that seemed a plea for help or at least a cry for investigation. The WWE defensively, but with some justification, maintains, "The physical findings announced by authorities indicate deliberation, not rage." The rest of the statement comes across as callously self-serving. It's damage-control mode, particularly with the suggestions that wrestling is connected with drugs, and that drugs were connected with these murders.

Drugs and alcohol give people a Mulligan. How many times have you heard, "It was the alcohol talking"? And it was. But it was the talker's decision to flow twelve beers into his mouth before flowing hateful speech out. Someone, and not an inanimate object, is responsible. But it is so much easier, particularly when an athletic "hero" is involved, to blame the gun, the coke, the circumstances, and not the actor.

Should chemicals be found in Chris Benoit's system, no doubt his fans will blame roid rage, Oxycontin, cocaine, or whatever. And it will perhaps have acted as a catalyst, or at least an integral part of the potent mix. But Chris Benoit, and not the drugs he chose to take, killed his wife and son.

It's called taking responsibility for ones behavior. Drunk (drugged) or sober.

At some point, a person has some idea of how chemicals affect them and that person needs to make a conscious decision that the result of taking those chemicals will have either a negative or a neglible impact.

Many don't. Makes it a tougher decision when your livelihood depends, to a large extent, on taking those chemicals. The consequences have to be weighed.