Dwain Chambers has done his time. An obvious point, perhaps, but one that desperately needs restating as the controversy surrounding his return to athletics intensifies.

Many have argued that Chambers should be banned for life for using performance-enhancing drugs, claiming that such a position has morality on its side. The reality is that to punish a man who has served time would be to commit a crime far more heinous than anything to which Chambers has confessed. This is not about being soft on drugs but about protecting a cornerstone of natural justice. Sure, we can have a legitimate debate about whether athletes should be banned for life for taking steroids, but this is not a discussion that has anything to do with Chambers unless and until he is found guilty of doping under a revised set of sanctions. Serving your time is one thing. Serving it again and again, retrospectively, at the behest of a baying mob, is nothing short of anarchy.

The stance of Niels de Vos, the chief executive of UK Athletics, is as hypocritical as it is self-defeating. By focusing his ire on Chambers while virtually ignoring Carl Myerscough – the shot-putter who has been invited to compete under the national banner – and others who have been found guilty of doping offences, he has created a groundswell of sympathy for the sprinter, something that was in telling evidence at the World Indoor Trials in Sheffield on Sunday. De Vos would have done better to have trained his attention on the war on drugs rather than inciting a morally pernicious and legally flawed witch-hunt.

This brings us to the key point about the Chambers affair. Those who have argued that progressively more punitive sanctions are the key weapon in the fight against drugs have done little except parade their ignorance. As anyone who has witnessed the competitive insanity of the Olympic Games will tell you, even a death sentence would be inadequate to deter drug-taking as long as detection rates remain so low. It is the probability of being caught (or not being caught) that is uppermost in the minds of potential cheats, not the severity of the sanction.

Which is why the most important front in the battle against doping is to be found in the Wada-accredited laboratories around the world, where scientists continue to devote their precious time to finding more robust and sophisticated detection methods – an area in which it is important to enlist the support of the likes of Victor Conte, the founder of the notorious Balco laboratory. Also of vital importance is the wider campaign to treat the business of drug usage as an international criminal issue requiring sophisticated intelligence-gathering and investigation.

Do not get me wrong, lifetime bans are not an irrelevance (although any such proposal would be subject to formidable legal hurdles), but they are far from being a panacea. What we need is to engage in radical action on drug-taking in sport rather than indulging in the mob justice that has disfigured the debate on Chambers.