Lance Armstrong... greatest doper there was or ever will be

Thing is though, aside from eye surgery or whatever, doping isn't permanent and you still have to work like a motherfucker to get the 'benefit' out of it, and even whilst getting said benefits you will still be hurting as bad as before, so the question is, what would the point be? Arriving at work 3 whole minutes earlier or 'beating' everyone on the local hill-climb? Pretty sure for the 99.99999999% dropping £25,000 on a year's supply of EPO and HGH will do nothing of any real meaning for them.

Depends on what you see is the benefit. If you have money to spare and don't mind being a cheating prick then it's game on. You don't need to be top level athlete to get benefits from doping. Any added power, any added bit of recovery that allows you to train more is cheating others. There's already cases of low level riders cheating so it's not like there's no precedent.