Medina Spirit did harder drugs than Sha’Carri Richardson and is still racing.

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) July 2, 2021

Here Gaetz is referring to US Olympic team sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson, who was suspended from the team for a month after she tested positive for marijuana on Thursday and may not be able to race in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. Medina Spirit is the horse whose win at the 2021 Kentucky Derby was marred when he tested positive for an anti-inflammatory steroid called betamethasone after the race. Medina Spirit was permitted to run in the Preakness Stakes (where he finished third), but not the Belmont, since the three Triple Crown races are governed independently by the state racing authorities of Kentucky, Maryland, and New York, respectively.

So Gatez’s tweet works if you ignore the circumstances where one competitor did get to race in half of the events they were berthed in instead of (probably) none of them. And if you ignore the fact that one substance is a depressant that does nothing to boost that runner’s speed – in fact it is more likely to harm it with habitual usage – while the other is definitely considered a performance enhancing drug and is banned as such. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, one of these competitors is a human being in possession of personal agency and an ability to perceive the consequences of violating the rules of one’s sport, while the other is horse who does not.

None of this is to say that Sha’Carri Richardson should be prevented from competing in the Olympics because who the hell cares if she smoked a joint recently, it has no bearing on her performance. Let us know if she tests positive for betamethasone. Matt Gaetz, for everything else wrong with him – and there’s a lot – is a reliable advocate for drug policy reform when they are very few and far between in the GOP. He could just be less fucking stupid about it than acting like the situations where a horse who has no idea what kind of shit he’s being injected with and a human sprinter getting high have anything beyond the most gratingly basic similarities.