I THOUGHT THEY WERE VITAMINS

Greens Senator Richard Di Natale wants a senate inquiry into drugs in sport. He wants leading players and coaching staff from the AFL and NRL to appear and explain how it could have happened. He’s right, they should.

When the ASADA investigation exploded in the media my first response was, “Suffer, scumbag hypocrites”. It seemed like vindication. I and some of the best people I know are viewed as filth by much of society. We will always – no matter what we do to improve ourselves – be defined by what we once did to assuage appalling emotional and psychological damage. Accordingly, every time we let someone new into our lives we face an uncomfortable decision: whether to be honest or lie about a mistake we can’t un-make.

And now here came the nation’s sporting heroes, held up as models of virtue for children to emulate, showered with money, adulation and all the privileges afforded by fame, revealed at last as the cheating thugs some of us have always known them to be.

I was long ago disabused of any romantic notions about footballers or cricketers – fifteen years in Kings Cross, watching them get drunk or wired, start fights, abuse women and generally be obnoxious, took care of that. This recovering junkie felt good knowing the rest of the country finally gets it too. Unlike the rape scandals a couple of years ago, this time there would be no excuses.

But I’ve had some time to think. Senator Di Natale’s proposed inquiry is so important precisely because the drug issue highlights many of the same institutional problems that produced those ugly sex stories.

Take a seventeen-year-old from the suburbs or the bush. Put him in a situation where his only job is to turn up at training and at the game on the weekend; where he’s the subject of hero-worship disproportionate to his actual accomplishment; where he rarely hears the word ‘no’; and where, so long as he keeps winning, his most outrageous behaviour will be excused or covered-up. It doesn’t take a genius to predict the likely result.

Football, by its nature, is a community.  A few leaders come to the fore; the rest are followers. That same seventeen-year-old will be impressionable. He will cast about for role-models. He will accept as normal whatever the coach, officials or prominent players do or say. If he’s told, ‘Take this “supplement”’ – he probably will, whatever his qualms.

A senate inquiry should hear those stories. Not to excuse them – most drug users have an external locus of control; given a chance to blame someone else they will – but to expose the complexities of the issue. It should be more than a public skewering of the end-users and their suppliers.

The players need a chance to take responsibility for their actions; the clubs and governing bodies need to be exposed in their complicity; it needs to be addressed as a cultural issue, not the misbehaviour of a few rogue individuals or clubs.

 And along the way maybe, just maybe, we’ll stumble over a more compassionate, more realistic understanding of the drug problem in the wider community.

Or not ...