THERE ARE PEOPLE OF DECENT INTENT WHO believe that doping in sport is an affront to all that is good and true. They have a point. Cheating renders every contest redundant. It is an insult to those who choose to be honest. Drugs are dangerous. And their use mocks the Olympic spirit.

More than that, dope holds a deeply unwholesome appeal for those more interested in power than in human endeavour. Users know they have not in any real sense "won". They know the cash rewards are counterfeit, the plaudits fraudulent. But they have gained an edge; they have taken control. Given the choice, these individuals decline fair means when foul becomes available.

All that being said, I can't wait for the first positive test at Beijing, and the moralising that will follow. Journalists, politicians and blazered officials will wring their hands freestyle. Personally, I can't think of a better symbol for China's Olympics. Like a steroid-crazed giant switching samples, the regime is getting away with it again. The games, with all that stirring talk of common humanity and idealism, are being debauched.

Nothing to do with performance-enhancing substances as such, unless you count paranoia as a class A drug. Totalitarian instincts, equally, might be seen as symptomatic of a craving for the addictive bliss of unfettered, unchallenged authority. When you fear your own people, when you fear the entire world, you need that stuff badly. You need a dealer, too.

Step forward, as they say, the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This is not a medals ceremony, ladies and gentlemen. Let us record, however, that you are not unfamiliar, institutionally, with the word corruption. Let's remember, too, that your cherished games were once the toy of a certain Herr Hitler. I don't say you will have surpassed yourself when the Beijing affair commences on Friday, but when it comes to deplorable, depressing and despicable - let's call that a triathlon - a career best might be in view.

Cast your minds back to the decision to award the games to China. Some of us wondered why a country with such a staggeringly bad human rights record could be so rewarded. You countered with the claim that a dose of Olympianism, plus exposure to a global audience, would actually encourage the Beijing regime to clean up its act. That one did not survive, at least in any plausible sense, the March protests in Tibet, and the ensuing bloody repression.

In fact, as I write, security has been further tightened in Lhasa. All leave for the Chinese security forces has been cancelled. The People's Armed Police are patrolling the streets just in case there's anyone left to arrest, beat and imprison.

Elsewhere, a teacher named Liu Shaokun has been sentenced to a year's "re-education through labour". His crime was to place online photographs of schools destroyed in May's earthquake. The parents of 9000 dead children want to know why surroundings buildings survived while schools collapsed. Mr Liu therefore joins Huang Qi, a human rights campaigner who helped the bereaved to organise. He has been charged with "illegal possession of state secrets", a capital offence.

Still, what has any of that to do, you ask, with running, jumping and splashing around? It is a bit late in the day to begin comparing the International Olympic Committee (IOC), simple athletes, governments, and 20,000 of the world's media with Amnesty International. That organisation contends that repression has actually grown worse, not better, as preparations for the games have intensified. The Amnesty bleeding hearts report that Chinese journalists, campaigners and the generally difficult have been swept from the streets (and their homes) to "protect China's image".

Visitors are welcomed, meanwhile. Only three security checks will be required to enter Beijing, a city more concerned at present with the smog of industrial prosperity than with the fog of morality. Anyone hoping to visit Tiananmen Square will face further scrutiny. Curfews are in place and public entertainments are subject to censorship.

All of this has a context older and wider than any sporting event, as Amnesty was last week at pains to point out. China's new-made prosperity is something of a myth, or at least a tale half told. Wealth inequalities are now greater, in a state that still calls itself communist, than in the US. The poor remain very poor while urban workers are bought off - or such is the hope - with TV sets and cars. Criminals are meanwhile executed at world-beating rates and labour camps, designed to teach dissidents those all-important socialist lessons, proliferate.

Given all that, the refusal to allow a few hacks access to a few websites could seem trivial. Perhaps it is, though not for the regime. Prior to the games the impression was given that the authorities were prepared to suppress their worst instincts and allow the 20,000 hacks flooding into Beijing to work freely. This was, like all the best propaganda, not even half true.

The IOC knew that censorship was never going to be relaxed and went along with the planned abuse, no doubt in the spirit of co-operation. Only last week, when journalists attempted to access the net, did IOC officials admit they had agreed to "restrictions".

Amnesty International? Unavailable. The BBC's Chinese Service? No chance. Reporters without Borders? You wish. America's Radio Free Asia, Germany's Deutsche Welle, anything with "Tibet" in the address, or even Wikipedia entries mentioning the Tiananmen massacre or the Falun Gong sect? Subversion, or just anything that differs from the approved version, will not be tolerated. Instead, internet access will be "sufficient" to the reporting of world records or failed dope tests while China's dissidents, journalists among them, rot.

The IOC is not the first of liberty's cherished institutions to cave in to the regime. Google did, cravenly. Rupert Murdoch, having given a speech claiming that totalitarianism would crumble in the face of technology, suddenly found it impossible to get a foothold in China. The BBC has long been accustomed to finding its signals jammed. But the question is blindingly simple: are the games worth all this? Or has an odious mixture of totalitarianism, IOC greed, global corporate sponsorship, multi-billion dollar TV deals and audience demand won tarnished gold?

Very probably. As it happens, I think it is unfair to expect young athletes to make a stand unaided over Tibet, human rights or anything else. They have worked hard for their moment, they have careers to protect, and their knowledge of what is at stake is likely to be limited. Governments are a different matter. Indignation over Burma, Zim-babwe or Sudan is easy. But it is Chinese capital that these days underwrites America's debts, and cheap Chinese imports that have, until recently, kept European inflation under control. So, unhindered, the regime cheats its people and the world. It has the power to do so, and it is hooked on that drug.

What about the 20,000 journalists though? Some, a few, will slip the security net and report on some of the things happening in China behind the Olympic facade. The rest, though, will get on with the job at hand, accepting the censorship, telling tales of glory amid the moral squalor of a totalitarian regime, and looking the other way.

Easy for me to say, sitting here in Scotland using a remote control for a boycott. I only ask: should anyone be sitting tapping at a keyboard in a plush media centre while their colleagues are in stinking jails for the crime of journalism? Opium and masses, anyone?