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.