This invariably makes me howl with frustration, though not for the reason you might expect.

After about 15 years covering this field I concluded long ago - big surprise - that doping is shadowy, slippery, the greyest of grey areas.

Yet it tends to get reported in lurid, comic-book black and white.

There are plenty of quite understandable reasons for this.

1. It is reassuring in a complicated world to have pantomime villains.

This can be the case even if we know the reassurance is false.

We surely know that not every ploy implemented by the opposition while watching our favourite football teams is devious and unworthy, but we are damned if we are going to admit it.

2. Journalists must quite rightly give athletes who have never tested positive, or been sanctioned as a result of intelligence-gathering, the benefit of any doubt, no matter how entrenched people’s suspicions.

This usually means that when an athlete is sanctioned, the media and others declare open season on him/her.

3. The quasi-legal nature of the anti-doping system reinforces the impression of a world in black and white.

Athletes are guilty, or they are innocent.

Yet sometimes the judgements taken are extremely fine, the traces of banned substances infinitesimally small.

It appears an increasingly unpopular view, but one can argue that athletes such as Justin Gatlin, who have been banned and returned to competition, risk falling victim to a kind of mob justice.

If you think those convicted of a sufficiently grave doping infraction should be banned for life - and there are perfectly respectable grounds for holding that opinion - then the proper course of action is to campaign to get the rules changed.

Until that happens, well, he has done his time.

As is inevitable with grey areas, the doping terrain is littered with assertions that shed more heat than light.

Sebastian Coe’s much-reported "declaration of war" statement may have been shrewd from an electoral standpoint, but I would put it firmly into that category.

The ARD allegations seem to me a conscientious attempt to assess the answer to a question that has long been one of doping’s most unfathomably grey areas: what is the true prevalence of cheating?

One assertion that is often trumpeted as almost unanswerable in its clarity is that doping could kill sport.

You can see what they mean.

Sponsors don’t want to be associated with rule breakers who get caught or sports with bad reputations.

Parents don’t want their kids to make life-choices that could jeopardise their health - though, speaking as a parent, I find some methods and training regimes that are within the rules off-putting enough.

Then again, cycling’s drug-addled image did not stop it from experiencing a noteworthy boom in Britain in the wake of the Olympic gold rush of 2008.

Granted, this popularity has been built in large part on a narrative of our heroic athletes showing that they could be champions without drugs.

But it still shows that winners are fundamental to a sport’s success.

And this, in turn, points to a key fact that sports administrators, who must deal with the world as they find it, must face up to.

Yes, doping could kill sport.

But so, with a cornucopia of alternatives just a mouse-click or two away, could lack of excitement, lack of world records, lack of apparent progress.

Will I be watching the Athletics World Championships as they unfold this coming week in Beijing’s magnificent Bird’s Nest Stadium, where I looked on dumb-struck seven years ago as Usain Bolt ran the only 100 metres in the last 27 years that was genuinely more breathtaking than Ben Johnson’s Olympic final in Seoul?

Oh yes.

Whatever you believe about drugs, it is compelling theatre; citius altius fortius in its most concentrated form.

But I will do my best to refrain from too many moral judgements.