Cannabis scrutiny excessive

[Tom]

Amid the whole hue and cry about the AFL and the WADA code, one essential question remains unanswered: why is cannabis, a non-performance-enhancing substance, on the banned list?

 

Dick Pound, the WADA chairman, could do no better than: "Part of the deal in sport is you don't take drugs." Federal Sports Minister Rod Kemp, from many opportunities, has shed even less light on the matter.

 

One journalist who has been critical of the AFL on the issue was asked the question directly on radio. He could merely respond with: "You'd have to ask WADA."

 

We are back where we started. If it were not serious, it would be funny. Sportspeople are being singled out for scrutiny that neither you nor I would have to tolerate, yet this scrutiny has nothing at all to do with cheating at sport.

 

Under the camouflage of testing for performance-enhancing drugs, footballers and other sportspeople are being subjected to an unconscionable invasion of privacy.

 

What's more, they have now found themselves vilified for caring about it. They are cast as villains. They must be junkies. It's unimaginable that they are simply responsible young people who want to protect their personal rights.

 

Perhaps they are even bigger than that. Perhaps they see a world in which civil liberties are being challenged and they identify their own circumstance as potentially, and very conspicuously, at the thin end of a dangerous wedge. Football, as we are frequently reminded, can have great influence in the community. It can be used insidiously as well as for good.

 

That the players have become the bad guys for resisting what has been imposed on them is wrong. Senior sports administrators should be capable of understanding that. Senior politicians, too, but let's live in the real world.

 

A footballer who returns one positive test to marijuana will now find himself all over the pages of the paper and could be disqualified for a year. A second positive test and he is out for two years. A third and it's game over. His career is finished. How Shane Warne's long-tormented opponents must wish sport's new paternalism extended to adultery.

 

Like Warne's misdemeanours, the taking of marijuana is not recommended and may pose damaging consequences, but it ought to have nothing whatever to do with one's eligibility to play competitive sport.

 

Yes, it is against the law in this state, but so is driving a car above 60 km/h in a metropolitan zone and the latter is these days pursued far more rigorously by the authorities. Besides, it is for those authorities to police such matters, not for sports administrators. WADA's province is the globe and in some countries the use of cannabis is perfectly legal.

 

The reality is that WADA is wrong and hopefully it will soon wake up to that fact. Its banned list is not carved in stone. The Federal Government is also wrong in holding a gun to football's head as it clearly has done.

 

A government that has felt no responsibility to heed the view of the United Nations on the matter of going to war in Iraq, or to ratify an international agreement like the Kyoto Protocol, has apparently felt obliged to bludgeon its way to unequivocal observance of the WADA code. Either that or football has been touched by the Howard Government's rigidly conservative ideology on the problems of illicit drugs.

 

As for the AFL, it has paid a heavy price for trying to craft a code that treated breaches on their merits. It has been belittled, bullied and, for the moment at least, beaten. In opting for counselling as a first response to a positive test, it had sought to find middle ground on the matter of cannabis.

 

This week's outcome suggests that was its only hope of satisfying WADA and the government, despite the fact that any screening for the substance remains a debatable issue. Its intended out-of-competition testing procedure is perhaps well intended but fraught with problems for it and its players. In that area it could learn from WADA.

 

This bitter experience might also have been a learning experience on another front for Andrew Demetriou.

 

His much-reported Australia Day address on immigration obviously ruffled feathers on high perches in Canberra. While it's doubtful it affected an intransigent government's view of the WADA code, Demetriou had delivered a cheeky backhander and was now standing, wide open, under a hospital handpass. They did not miss him.

 

Author: Tim Lane

Date:July 23, 2005

Source:www.theage.com.au

Copyright:© 2005 John Fairfax Holdings

 

Here in WA we are being subjected to adds telling us how mj is an anti-performance drug that saps energy and initiative. ::