“If you’re a parent of a 17-year-old who wants to play footy,” Tom Elliott said on 3AW this week, “there’s a one in eight chance your son will become a drug addict. If you are worried about your innocent son going into an environment where drug use is encouraged, where it’s aided and abetted, where it’s hidden from public view, that’s what will happen.”
Andrew Wilkie’s speech to the federal parliament, which called for the personal intervention of the prime minister, which referred to the footballers as “corporate cannon fodder”, and which punned on “white line fever”, invited that kind of hysteria. “Footy Drugs Rort” was the initial Herald Sun headline. “A protection racket”, Elliott described the AFL. Joel Smith entered Hansard as an “alleged drug trafficker”. Eddie McGuire weighed in with a plan to drug test schoolboy footballers. “Enough is enough,” he said. “They’re going to bring in a punitive code. I think everyone now understands sunlight is the best disinfectant, that you are better off having it out into the open.”
The AFL’s illicit drug policy is a compromise. It’s part punitive, part harm minimisation, part rehabilitation, part brand management. It’s flawed. It’s clearly being exploited. But doctor-patient confidentiality is at its core. That won’t do, of course. Elliott believes the public has as much right to know about a player’s drug habit as their torn ACL. When Elliott’s radio station and the Herald Sun cover the issues of safe injecting facilities, pill testing and drug addiction, they are rarely renowned for their nuance and restraint. Throw AFL footballers into the mix and it hits all the right buttons – name them, shame them and ban them.
“There is a simple line on this,” McGuire said this week. “It is not compulsory to play football – it is compulsory to play football drug free.” But it’s never that simple. Young athletes take drugs for all sorts of reasons. Some are self-medicating. Some are addicted. Some are experimenting. Some are acting like twits. Under Eddie and Tom’s model, all would fall under the same umbrella. All would be at the mercy of the mob, the bin trawler, the shock jock, the talkback caller and the Footy Classified panellist.
The zero-tolerance approach sounds good in a rant. But how successful has a punitive approach to drugs been around the world? How would a zero-policy approach to illicit drugs work with young, risk-taking athletes? Its advocates invariably reference how pilots, air traffic controllers and the operators of heavy machinery are drug tested and can be sacked on the spot. Even Elliott says his contract would be terminated if he tested positive. But the comparison is ridiculous. A 20-year-old footballer is trying to penetrate a zone defence. They’re not flying a Boeing 737, extracting iron ore or fielding talkback calls.
It’s very difficult to have a measured conversation around drugs. It’s hard enough when the player is caught red handed. TV coverage can often resemble a comedy skit. It becomes a performance piece from the player, from the club and from the people who break the story.
When Bailey Smith was caught up in a drugs scandal of his own, Jeff Kennett said he should be banned for two years without pay. It’s a worry when a former club president, the former head of the country’s biggest mental health advocacy and a former state premier is so obtuse. “By having a zero-tolerance policy, we’re potentially protecting their lives,” he said.
For Kennett and McGuire, their issue as club presidents was always a lack of control. They really had no idea what was going on with their players, and they’re not men who take kindly to that. But it’s instructive listening to former players, politicians and prominent media figures, all of whom cut their teeth in industries that were drowning in booze, opining on this issue.
It can be hard explaining to someone older than us, someone who has never taken drugs, that this isn’t particularly unusual behaviour. It can be hard telling our kids that one of their heroes has been caught taking drugs. Their heroes play in a stadium named after a superhero franchise. But they’re as fallible as the rest of us. They’re part of the same society. And all the things they’re celebrated for – their youth, their appetite for risk, their celebrity – make universal abstinence completely fanciful.
There’s no doubt that some players are gaming the policy. There’s no doubt that “hamstring awareness”, “managed” and “personal issues” will now be the subject of all sorts of innuendo. And there’s no doubt the policy needs to be reworked and strike a better balance between privacy and transparency. But to focus on a punitive, zero tolerance approach, an approach that kicks transgressors to the curb, would simply be bowing to the loudest and most blinkered, and would be a travesty for the game and the young people who play it.
