A-Rod drugs confession

US baseball's highest paid player - Alex Rodriguez - has publicly confessed to using performance-enhancing steroids earlier in his career (around 2001), which raises some important questions for agencies such as WADA: how should athletes in any sport be dealt with when they confess to previous misdemeanours? If drug control agencies take retrospective action, will this ultimately silence athletes who wish to confess thereby driving problems underground? But if drug control agencies do not take action, does this effectively condone what the athletes have done? Or is there another approach that can be taken?