Bra doping at the women’s Tour de France

 I follow the Tour de France, partly out of an interest in performance enhancing drugs.  But from time to time other strategic kinds of doping are also discussed, as in altering the bikes rather than the bike riders.

In this connection, The Tour de France Femmes, the women's Tour, now has a discussion of bra doping, for better aerodynamics:

Bra doping at the women’s Tour de France 

"This year’s Tour de France Femmes has been rocked by allegations that some riders are artificially exaggerating their bust size to gain an aerodynamic advantage.

Several women’s World Tour teams have raised concerns that cyclists on rival teams are padding their sports bras to give them a boost in time trials, according to leading Dutch cycling news site, WielerFlits.

"The practice of “chest fairing” – also known as “bra boosting” or “bra doping” – involves increasing the surface area of the chest to change the airflow around the torso. Other forms of chest fairing include placing a water bottle or radio receiver under your cycling jersey. This can reduce drag, potentially saving valuable seconds in a time trial, where aerodynamics are crucial.

An optimised chest fairing can reduce drag by as much as 3.6%, which could gain a time-trial cyclist at least 0.78 seconds every kilometre, according to research published in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics in 2024. “You won’t gain tens of seconds,” said study lead Bert Blocken, an aerodynamics expert at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. But over a 20- to 30-km time trial, “it could save enough seconds to make the difference”.

 #########

Earlier posts:

Friday, July 25, 2025  Tour de France competitions: conditioning, bikes, and drugs?

 Agence France Presse (AFP) reports on the bike race, and speculates on the historical competition between drug takers and drug testers.

 

Tuesday, July 8, 2025 Doping in the Tour de France: new dimensions

 There was a time when only riders had to be tested for doping, but advances in electric motors and batteries mean that bikes too can be suspect.  However it's the riders who get the most, increasingly sophisticated scrutiny.

True Crime: Illegal markets have great variety (PNAS)

 The forthcoming issue of PNAS (August 18, 2026 | vol. 123 | no. 33) has a big set of papers on illegal markets, with the goal of searching for common features, which turn out to be somewhat elusive.

Research ArticleAugust 10, 2026

A budding science of illegal markets

Illegal markets create untold societal and environmental harm, but they have attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention. This paper explores illegal markets as a class of objects. It considers similarities and differences across markets, with ...

• Jonathan P. Caulkins

"The raw material for these comparisons mostly comes from the February 2025 Policy and Research on Illegal Markets (PRIM) workshop held at RAND in Santa Monica. The workshop convened 17 experts on nine specific markets, or types of markets. They wrote the market-specific papers contained within this volume."  

Research ArticleAugust 10, 2026

Stability and turbulence in illegal drug markets

This article provides a primer on illegal drug markets, with a focus on the structure and nature of these markets and the enterprises involved. The markets for illegal drugs are large, with annual retail expenditures likely exceeding $100 billion in the ...

• Beau Kilmer
• 
  

IntroductionAugust 10, 2026

Illegal markets: An important domain for applied science

• Jonathan P. Caulkins,
• Beau Kilmer and
• Peter Reuter

"One premise of this special issue is that illegal markets and the supply chains that support them are a worthy topic of scientific inquiry. That turns out to be a novel claim. Illegal markets have simply not been a major topic of interest to economists, the discipline that would most plausibly study them. For example, Nobel laureate Alvin Roth, in his magisterial review of markets and market design, describes illegal markets but offers no specific analytic insights about them (2[A. E. Roth, Marketplaces, markets, and market design. Am. Econ. Rev. 108, 1609–1658 (2018).]). Gary Becker, one of the giants of microeconomics, wrote occasionally about drug markets but forced on them the presumption that they were analytically no different than legal markets (e.g., ref. 3). 

Research ArticleAugust 10, 2026

How illegal wildlife trade adheres to and defies conventional market behavior

Illegal wildlife markets comprise a complex global economy generating criminal profits while harming biodiversity and livelihoods. The negative externalities from biodiversity loss, ecosystem destabilization, and zoonotic disease risk may be orders of ...

• Greg Midgette and
• Meredith L. Gore

"At least since the third century BCE, when the Edicts of Ashoka prohibited the killing of animals with aesthetic value on the Indian subcontinent, wildlife has been trapped, harvested, and sold in contravention of laws (1). " 

PerspectiveAugust 10, 2026

Illegal firearms markets: Transaction patterns, evolving sources, and importance in criminal misuse

In the United States, the legal status of the 30 to 40 million annual firearms transactions is defined by state and federal regulations. These regulations primarily aim to reduce criminal misuse while preserving access for the large majority of adults who ...

• Philip J. Cook and
• Rosanna Smart

"Illegal transactions in firearms are often embedded in the much larger formal and informal markets, simply because sellers cannot easily distinguish between legal and illegal buyers even if they are motivated to do so. As one analogy, illegal firearms transactions look less like the market for heroin, where everyone involved knows the illegality of their transaction, than that for diverted pharmaceuticals." 

PerspectiveAugust 10, 2026

The market for human smuggling: Structure, mechanisms, and paradoxes

Human smuggling is the facilitation of unlawful cross-border movement. It is primarily a commercial activity, offered as a service to willing, paying customers, and a large-scale market catering to millions seeking to circumvent mobility restrictions. ...

• Paolo Campana

"The terms human smuggling and human trafficking are often confused, but they represent two very different phenomena, albeit potentially occurring in the same places and populations. While a victim of trafficking and a genuine client of a smuggler might find themselves shoulder-to-shoulder in the same inflatable boat, thus sharing the same means to cross the same border, smuggling and trafficking remain distinct—both analytically and legally. In the case of smuggling, the service provided is the illegal entry into a country—and a migrant enters into the transaction with a smuggler voluntarily (1). Some may have few options other than to migrate, and in that sense be forced to migrate, but they are not forced into that action by an individual or organization selling them the smuggling service. The relationship between a migrant and a smuggler terminates when the former has reached the agreed destination and paid the latter the agreed sum. On the other hand, the purpose of trafficking is obtaining control over a person for exploitation, including sexual exploitation, labor exploitation, or domestic servitude (2).† Victims of human trafficking may enter a country through legal channels, and in some cases, trafficking takes place wholly within national borders." 

PerspectiveAugust 10, 2026

The money laundering market: An economic analysis

Criminals launder their proceeds from crime, either themselves or by paying a professional, to disguise the link between the criminal, the crime, and the proceeds. This allows the criminal to spend the proceeds more freely and lowers the chance of ...

• Joras Ferwerda

"Since the goal of money laundering is to go unnoticed or to be seen as some other form of legitimate transaction, it is, by nature, difficult to provide credible estimates of how big the problem is. Moreover, the purchase of laundering services is generally a consensual crime: Both parties voluntarily enter into the transaction. Consensual crimes lack a direct victim to report the crime, which means the crime is revealed only when it is actively investigated.
There are a number of estimates of the volume of money laundering. These range in credibility; some lack empirical backup altogether [e.g., the widely quoted International Monetary Fund estimate of 2 to 5% of global GDP (3)]..." 

PerspectiveAugust 10, 2026

Casting light on the workings of illegal fishing markets

About 3.5 million fishing vessels ply the world’s oceans, providing livelihoods and food for millions of people. Sound management is key to fisheries’ sustainability, but illegal fishing, along with fishing overcapacity generally and environmental change, ...

• Philippe Le Billon,
• Zelda Ladefoged and
• U. Rashid Sumaila

 

PerspectiveAugust 10, 2026

Illegal markets for cigarettes and e-cigarettes

This paper discusses the long-standing illegal markets for cigarettes and the more recently emerged illegal markets for e-cigarettes. We identify three distinctive market fundamentals that help explain many features of the illegal markets. First, in ...

• Donald Kenkel and
• Grace Phillips

"In 2024, tobacco products generated almost $1 trillion in revenues, mainly from cigarette sales; e-cigarettes generated $26 billion dollars (1–3). While the share of the illegal markets varies by country, it is estimated that illegal markets account for about 10 percent of global cigarette consumption (4). Second, the illegal markets have arisen to evade high excise taxes that increase prices and regulations that restrict the availability of desirable features of legal products.  "

PerspectiveAugust 10, 2026

The illegal market for sex in the United States: Insights from economic research

The illegal market for sex in the United States generates significant economic activity yet remains understudied due to its illegality and clandestine nature. This paper synthesizes existing empirical evidence documenting aspects of market structure, ...

• Manisha Shah

"Although sex work is often perceived as predominantly occurring in marginalized urban areas or among underprivileged cultural groups, sex work is pervasive at all echelons of society. Media portrayals often emphasize street-based sex work, presenting it as the predominant form of prostitution; however, street-based sex work has been estimated to account for approximately 10 to 15% of total sex work participation (2). In the United States and in many other countries, the majority of the sex market has moved “indoors,” whether that be through massage parlors or brothels and/or online encounters." 

PerspectiveAugust 10, 2026

The policy construction of illegal markets: Exploring variation, success, failure, and unintended consequences

Illegal markets, broadly defined to include markets where only specific transactions are illegal, are the consequence of policy, either a prohibition or highly restrictive regulation. They are generated by a variety of concerns, some moral, some ...

• Letizia Paoli and
• Peter Reuter

"Drugs that are now prohibited were perfectly legal in most countries until the early 20th century. Famously, the British fought two “Opium Wars” with China (1839–1842 and 1856–1858) to open up that nation to opium exports from India (8). Cannabis, the most popular plant-based illegal drug, was cultivated—and also grew wildly—in at least four continents and until the 1920s “the large majority of countries did not have any controls at all” (9). However, the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs virtually prohibited all production and distribution of many prominent psychoactive substances, including heroin, cocaine, and cannabis; it also prohibited possession. Since then, drug transactions have grown to form what is generally believed to be the largest illegal market globally. For the United States (US), an estimate for 2016, the latest available, was over $150 billion (10)." 

PerspectiveAugust 10, 2026

A descriptive analysis for the markets for counterfeit products

Product counterfeiting is a pervasive crime that involves the unauthorized use of a legitimate trademark, a violation of intellectual property rights. Counterfeiting is also one of many forms of global illicit trade, mirroring legitimate markets in ...

• Jay P. Kennedy

"US Customs and Border Protection reports (2) regarding intellectual property rights violations state that the most commonly seized counterfeit products at US ports of entry in 2024 were handbags/wallets (36% of all seizures), pharmaceuticals (27%), and apparel (7.4%). Other products seized included footwear, automotive parts, health and beauty products, and electronics like cell phones, computers, microprocessors, and circuit boards. While Customs seizure reports give an indication of the types of products identified and interdicted by law enforcement agencies, many more counterfeit products slip past customs agents and enter the market, including items like counterfeit aircraft parts, military equipment, weapons systems components, and even parts for nuclear reactors. "

##########

Some of these markets are also discussed in my recent book, 

Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work  

 

 

The enemy in the war on drugs is no longer agriculture, but chemistry

 One drug future may be happening first in Estonia, hard on the Russian border.

The NYT has the story :

Estonia Won the War on Fentanyl. What Came Next Was Even Worse.
By 2018, fentanyl overdoses in Estonia had plummeted. But powerful new drugs are appearing fast, with the authorities racing to respond.  By Azam Ahmed

“We wish we still had a fentanyl problem,” said Raigo Aas, the chief prosecutor for organized crime in Estonia.

"The first new drugs to arrive, known as nitazenes, sent mortality rates skyrocketing again, proving even more addictive and harder to treat or quit. New varieties keep popping up, too, some more than 40 times stronger than fentanyl.

...

"Exceedingly powerful substances are being churned out with such speed that the agencies created to stop them are baffled, racing to keep up. 

...

"Just as science has made plastics, medicines and foods phenomenally more varied and abundant, it has revolutionized illicit substances. Once grown in the soil, dependent on rain, sun and crop cycles, illicit drugs today are increasingly formulated in laboratories, with very few constraints.

"And with each iteration, the drugs grow more terrifying. It’s not just the overdoses and deaths they bring: Their incredible potency makes recovery much harder, deepening addiction and, by extension, the crisis it creates.

...

“We really thought the fentanyl period had taught us how to handle an opioid crisis,” said Kristin Mikko, a health coordinator in Estonia’s Ministry of Social Affairs. But the new drugs, she said, are “something different. They are so much more lethal.” 

 

and this:

"Yet cychlorphine was so new at the time that it wasn’t even illegal yet in Estonia; the authorities couldn’t charge him for it. The drug didn’t become banned in Estonia until this past spring.

“It makes our work harder,” Rait Pikaro, a former drug police head, said of the constantly shifting drug landscape. “It never stops.” 

 

 

The innovative supply chain of illegal drugs--even in prisons

 Strategy sets are big, so we’re not going to be able to end illegal drug use by spraying defoliants on fields of poppies, or arresting dealers, or attacking speedboats. If we can’t stop the spread of drugs even in prisons, the chance of purely police/military solutions for stopping drugs on the streets isn’t looking good.

The NYT has the story:

No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing
Lab-made drugs soaked into the pages of letters, books and even legal documents are being smuggled behind bars, killing inmates and frustrating investigators. By Azam Ahmed and Matt Richtel 

" Today, fringe chemists are ushering in a total transformation of the illicit drug market. Operating from clandestine labs, they are churning out a dizzying array of synthetic drugs — not only fentanyl, but also hazardous new tranquilizers, stimulants and complex cannabinoids. Sometimes, several unknown drugs appear on the streets in a single month. Many are so new they are not even illegal yet.

"Nearly all of them are harder to trace than conventional drugs, less expensive to produce, much more potent and far deadlier, according to scientists and law enforcement officials across the globe.

...

"After that first death in the Cook County jail in January 2023, it took months for Mr. Wilks’s team to realize that these mysterious new drugs were being sprayed onto the pages of the most innocuous-seeming items: books, letters, documents, even photographs.

"The sheets of drugs, worth thousands of dollars a page, were being torn into strips and smoked by inmates 

...

"But the traffickers were cunning. When regular mail got checked more closely, smugglers began lacing legal correspondence. Soon, officers discovered sealed packages that looked as if they had been shipped directly from Amazon, with drug-soaked books inside. "

############

It’s hard to shut down markets that people want to participate in.
Someone should write a book about this. 

How to regulate legal marijuana?

 The New York Times editorial board thinks about the current environment for (now legal) marijuana, and calls for more careful regulation, and federal taxation:

It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem 

"Thirteen years ago, no state allowed marijuana for recreational purposes. Today, most Americans live in a state that allows them to buy and smoke a joint. President Trump continued the trend toward legalization in December by loosening federal restrictions.

This editorial board has long supported marijuana legalization. In 2014, we published a six-part series that compared the federal marijuana ban to alcohol prohibition and argued for repeal. Much of what we wrote then holds up — but not all of it does.

At the time, supporters of legalization predicted that it would bring few downsides. In our editorials, we described marijuana addiction and dependence as “relatively minor problems.” Many advocates went further and claimed that marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits. They also said that legalization might not lead to greater use.

 

It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong. Legalization has led to much more use. Surveys suggest that about 18 million people in the United States have used marijuana almost daily (or about five times a week) in recent years. That was up from around six million in 2012 and less than one million in 1992. More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol. 

...

"The unfortunate truth is that the loosening of marijuana policies — especially the decision to legalize pot without adequately regulating it — has led to worse outcomes than many Americans expected. It is time to acknowledge reality and change course." 

 

Magic mushrooms have a role in hospice care

 Pain experienced while dying may be partly spiritual.

 National Geographic has the story: 

These drugs could be a game changer for end-of-life care
Certain psychoactive substances can improve the mental health of terminally ill cancer patients—but few patients can currently access them.  By Meryl Davids Landau

 "Several years ago in Vancouver Island, Canada, a 32-year-old mother with advanced metastatic cancer was so wracked with pain and a fear of dying she constantly wept in bed. Through a targeted Canadian government program, the woman accessed psilocybin, the main psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms. The day after taking a dose of the drug she was pain-free, able to joke with family members and reconnect with old friends before she died the following week.

...
"The drugs can help with “the existential component of pain that is tied in with spiritual and psychological experiences,” something conventional medicine has few tools to address, says Masuda, a physician with SATA Centre for Conscious Living, who has since facilitated dozens of psychedelic sessions for similar patients.

"Some 400 terminal patients in Canada have legally accessed psilocybin in the past five years via its special programs, and several countries already allow for similar uses. Due to federal drug laws, terminally ill people in the U.S. cannot currently take psilocybin outside of a handful of clinical trials.

"But this may finally change, as government agencies are evaluating whether to allow its use for end-of-life care—thanks to pressure from physicians and years of research. Many palliative care doctors in the U.S. say the change can’t come soon enough." 

Brain drugs, a review (performance enhancement, side effects, and addiction)

 From the Free Press,  tasting notes on a variety of performance enhancing drugs for concentration, finally converging on what sounds like nicotine addiction.

I Tried Wall Street’s Famous Brain Drugs
My experimental high and crash through the not-quite-legal, sort of effective, occasionally heart-pounding medicine cabinet of Wall Street and Silicon Valley’s productivity optimizers.  by  Park MacDougald

"Vyvanse:
The brand name for lisdexamfetamine, a prodrug that, once ingested, slowly converts to dextroamphetamine, one of the active ingredients in Adderall. Originally developed as a longer acting and less easily abused alternative to dextroamphetamine, lisdexamfetamine is now the third most commonly prescribed stimulant in the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), with around 15 million prescriptions dispensed in 2023. With insurance, a 30-day supply of Vyvanse can run around $60.

...

" Strattera:  Generic name atomoxetine, Strattera is a selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor initially developed by Eli Lilly to treat depression, but later approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as an ADHD treatment when it was found to be ineffective for its intended use. Strattera is far less commonly prescribed than Adderall, Vyvanse, or Ritalin—4.3 million prescriptions were dispensed in 2023, per the DEA—but may be favored for patients with a history of addiction, due to its low potential for abuse. It’s also cheap; with my insurance, a month’s supply of Strattera cost less than $10.

...

"Dextroamphetamine: Basically like Adderall but without levoamphetamine, a less potent amphetamine isomer that helps to smooth the overall effects of the drug. Dextroamphetamine, or “dexy,” has been available since the 1930s, and was issued to U.S. bomber pilots in World War II to help keep them awake on nighttime missions. It’s still around today, but far less common than Adderall or Ritalin (methylphenidate). Around 915,000 dextroamphetamine prescriptions were dispensed in the United States in 2023, according to the DEA.

...

"Modafinil: Unlike the other drugs on this list, Modafinil is not primarily an ADHD treatment. It’s a non-amphetamine stimulant and “wakefulness-promoting agent” developed in France during the 1970s and 1980s as a treatment for narcolepsy, but its current claim to fame is for its use by the U.S. Air Force to manage pilot fatigue on long missions (it’s also frequently prescribed for night-shift workers). Prescription modafinil is generally cheap with insurance, but the variant I bought—a supplement containing adrafinil, a closely related substance—cost $40 for a jar of 30 pills.

...

 "Zyn: Zyn is the original brand of smokeless tobacco pouches, introduced by a Swedish company, Swedish Match, as a tobacco-free alternative to Snus in 2014 (its major competitor, Velo, is also Swedish, though both companies are now owned by international tobacco conglomerates). In the United States, Zyn is sold in tins of 3 mg or 6 mg pouches, though the European version of the product—which I purchase from my local Yemeni-owned bodega in New York City—also comes in 9 mg, 11 mg, and 13.5 mg varieties. Retail, in New York, a tin costs around $9—up from $5–$6 only a few years ago.

...

"For me, however, 6 mg of Zyn—rising to 9 mg in times of crisis—has become a necessity akin to drinking water. I no longer know what Zyn “feels like,” per se, since I only feel its absence, in the form of scattered attention, forgetfulness, and low-level irritability. When I am on deadline or otherwise swamped with work, I rarely go 10 minutes without a pouch in my mouth."

 

Tour de France competitions: conditioning, bikes, and drugs?

 Agence France Presse (AFP) reports on the bike race, and speculates on the historical competition between drug takers and drug testers.

Pogacar's Tour superiority stirs up old doping debate.  Tadej Pogacar's towering domination of this year's Tour de France is once again raising eyebrows in a sport long tainted by the spectre of doping.

"Pogacar himself brushes off the suggestions of skulduggery he has had to face ever since his first Tour win five years ago, always insisting that he should be "trusted".

"Last October he said to dope "is to ruin your life". "I don't want to take the risk of falling ill one day," he added, pointing out that cycling was "a victim of its past".
"
He continued, with an air of resignation: "There is no trust, and I don't know what can be done to restore it."

Dope-testing on the Tour

"Around 600 blood and urine samples will be collected from the peloton during this year's race, with 350 out-of-competition samples taken in the run-up to cycling's blue riband event. 

...

"A selection of the samples are held for 10 years to allow for retro-testing with the advance of new detection techniques.

The UCI also inspects bikes to prevent any technical cheating.

While ketones to help store energy are permitted and widely used, the UCI banned the inhalation of carbon monoxide earlier this year.

...

"Pogacar's ability to smash records set by infamous dopers like disgraced seven-time winner Lance Armstrong or Pantani is remarkable.

...

"And as in other sports, cycling has made enormous progress since the EPO years.

"Technology has led to faster bikes, with the Tour's technical director Thierry Gouvenou suggesting a there has been a 10% gain in performance just thanks to better two-wheeled machines. Nutrition and training have also evolved."

The science and politics of vaping in the U.S

 The Washington Post has the story:

FDA lets Juul market vapes in the U.S. three years after trying to ban them
Federal regulators first announced a ban of Juul products in 2022, although a court order allowed them to stay on store shelves while the company filed an appeal.  By David Ovalle and Shannon Najmabadi
 

"The Food and Drug Administration has authorized Juul Labs to market its electronic cigarettes, years after the agency tried to ban the company’s products amid outcry over its role in fueling the popularity of vapes among young people.

"The agency, after reviewing scientific data provided by the company, concluded that Juul’s electronic cigarette device and refillable cartridges in tobacco and menthol flavors can help adult cigarette users reduce smoking or switch to less harmful products, outweighing the risk to youth.

...

"The news comes a few days after the Vapor Technology Association, an industry group, said it launched a seven-figure ad campaign urging President Donald Trump to draw a distinction between vape products targeting youths and “safer, adult-focused alternatives” touted as smoking-cessation tools. Trump previously offered enthusiastic support for vaping and promised to protect the industry while campaigning in 2024.

...

"A 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found vapes were the most common tobacco product used by middle- and high-schoolers. About 1.6 million students use electronic cigarettes, according to the survey — and nearly 90 percent of those who vape prefer the flavored liquids, the survey reported.

Thursday’s Juul decision drew immediate outcry from public health groups that assert vapes are addictive and can harm the development of maturing brains."