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.
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