After 22 years, the AFL has finally stopped pretending with its illicit drugs policy and strikes

They were treated (many successfully, some not) in confidence, at the behest of the club and AFL doctors, who were given enormous responsibility for the nature of the drug-using player’s treatment and, in extreme cases, rehabilitation.

The doctors did the heavy lifting, and were also placed in a difficult position due to the confidentiality – they couldn’t tell club officials if a player was in treatment, and they also had to provide explanations for the players who were ruled unfit to play after being sidelined by the policy.

“Personal issues” thus became a euphemism, which was problematic for players with another kind of personal issue who had not used drugs. Doctors this column has consulted say that, contrary to Andrew Wilkie’s assertions in parliament, they never used fake hamstrings or alike as cover stories. If this has happened, it was not the accepted norm.

The policy’s flaw was never how players were treated under a medically supervised system. It was that the public was actively misled by the AFL’s official line about strikes.

Finally, 22 years after Andrew Demetriou introduced this ambitious drug testing and treatment regime, the AFL has ended the absurd pretence that there are strikes.

It is overdue and a necessary correction. The same applies to the introduction of an illicit drugs code to the AFLW.

There will be a cohort of law-and-order types who might view the scrapping of strikes (which were really only detections under urine testing) as the mollycoddling of footballers, who would be sacked if they were in other workplaces.

It is unfortunate, if predictable, that some people are more concerned about the drug use of footballers than that of truck and Uber drivers, forklift drivers and even electricians. Such is the nature of a celebrity-saturated culture – the notion that a privileged, pampered group are “getting away with it” drives resentment.

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You might be sacked for abusing drugs in some workplaces. But few of us will be subjected to mandatory urine – and now the more revealing hair – testing.

The conversation around AFL drug use and abuse is shifting, too, in to one that is more realistic.

More than ever, the football public seems to know the identities of a small group of recent or current players who’ve had issues with drug use – which can also include prescription drugs – and are less up in arms about it than they were in 2010 or 2015. Many recognise that the overlap between drug use and mental health is considerable, albeit some players have been able to plead the latter to avoid being labelled with the former.

The majority of the adult population have friends who’ve used cocaine, ecstasy or marijuana. Millions have a relative or friend who’s had a drug abuse problem. When you know someone whose welfare is endangered, the hope is usually for rehabilitation, not punishment.

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That said, it is not asking too much to expect that an AFL player can front up on game day, or to training – their workplace – without cocaine in their system.

The revamped policy will likely place more players into a treatment framework, due to hair testing. The fact that players may pay for their treatment and have to meet benchmarks within it, is also commendable.

By wiping the strikes that were never genuinely enforced, the AFL and its players have struck a better, truer arrangement.

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