Pubdate: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 Source: Guardian, The (CN PI) Copyright: 2003 The Guardian, Charlottetown Guardian Group Incorporated Contact: http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/174 Author: Michael Hann THE PERSECUTION WE CALL DRUG TESTING It Is Dishonest To Stigmatise Footballers Who Take Recreational Substances That Do Not Enhance Performance Few observers of football doubt the prevalence of drugs in the game. Not the performance-enhancing ones, but the ones some players take for fun. Cocaine in the nightclub after a game, marijuana at someone's house after the club, maybe some speed as a pick-me-up after the marijuana. A survey of 700 players conducted by the BBC earlier in the year found that 46% of them were aware of colleagues using recreational drugs. Such abuse must be "eradicated", said Gordon Taylor, the leader of the players' union, at the time. Illegal recreational drugs are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency. It specifies that a substance be prohibited if it meets any two of three criteria: if there is evidence that it enhances or has the potential to enhance performance; if there is evidence that it represents an actual or potential health risk; if the use of the substance violates the spirit of sport. Recreational drugs are banned largely because they are considered to fulfil the second and third criteria, although some - such as cocaine and amphetamines - are classed as stimulants with the potential to enhance performance (which might be the case in some sports, but in plenty of others - and football springs to mind - it almost certainly isn't). The official guidance of UK Sport, which supervises drug testing in this country, is straightforward: "The use of illegal drugs brings sport into disrepute and can ruin a sporting career." But is that really good enough? While illegal drugs have the potential to damage athletes' health and threaten their careers, so do plenty of legal drugs, such as tobacco or alcohol - just ask Jimmy Greaves or George Best. Is sport brought into greater disrepute by an athlete toking on a spliff or by gangs of boozed-up footballers picking up girls and taking them to hotels to be "roasted"? Indeed, a representative of UK Sport accepted in an informal conversation that there did not seem to be any good reason for the discrepancy in the regulations concerning illegal recreational drugs and alcohol and tobacco. The effect of the ban on recreational drugs - especially marijuana - is to turn anti-doping bodies into an extension of the law-enforcement agencies, something they have no business being. In an age of increasing liberalisation of the laws covering soft drugs, it is perverse that sportsmen and women should face ever more stringent regulation of their social activities. If others are not being harmed (let us leave aside the arguments about drug gangs and gun crime) and no competitive advantage is being gained, sporting bodies have no right to regulate competitors' social behaviour. This concerns football, particularly, where the use of recreational drugs is a greater issue than in other sports, but the use of performance-enhancing drugs is proportionately less common, at least according to reports from UK Sport. Between 1988 and 2002, football was the source of 29 positive tests for marijuana, out of a total of 72 in all British sport. Football also accounted for 71 positive tests for stimulants, out of a total of 458. But a glance through UK Sport's recent reports showed that most footballers who test positive for stimulants do so for cocaine, not for the performance-enhancing substances, such as ephedrine, that crop up in dietary supplements and are found most often in other sports. And guess what? The punishments for the use of prohibited recreational drugs, particularly cocaine, are astoundingly severe. To get equivalent punishments for other substances, it seems you would have to be caught red-handed with an empty syringe and a note from the doctor reading "This drug is used and endorsed by Ben Johnson". UK Sport's report for 2002-03 reveals the following punishments for cocaine: footballers receiving bans of nine months and three months, and two bans of two years and one of seven months handed out to ice hockey players; for marijuana, a footballer was suspended for three months, and an athlete at last year's Commonwealth Games was stripped of his medal and banned from the next games. These people were almost certainly not cheating. What they did was illegal, and we might not approve of it. But they were not seeking to gain an advantage. They were victims of the misconception that someone with an innate talent for kicking a ball, or hitting a puck while wearing ice skates, or running, jumping, swimming or diving, is some how a role model and must be expected to live to higher standards than others. But these sportspeople are not role models. Who outside a tiny minority would even have heard of the ice hockey players? And a great many of the footballers who test positive for drugs have been very young, far from the fame of the first teams and stigmatised as drug users in a way the mates they smoke with never will be - purely because their talent happened to be for football. If we really believe, like Gordon Taylor, in the eradication of recreational drugs from professional sport, then let us call in the police and ask them to charge the wrongdoers. Excessive? Of course. But at least it would not be social engineering masked as the promotion of sportsmanship. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens