This week's calls to ‘open up’ the AFL and NRL in-house illicit drug testing programmes simply underlines what I have said in two previous posts.

It is a dangerous strategy and now the likes of Paul Roos (Sydney Swans) and Michael Voss (Brisbane Lions) of the AFL have recognised the fallibility of the system. At the very least they have called for the naming of players who test positive in which the clubs themselves could take responsibility for treatment and punishment. A cynic (like me) see’s the AFL’s approach of hiding positive tests and identities as mere image protection.

The fact that 24 players  tested positive to illicit drugs between February 2005 and August 2006 is an alarming statistic. To put this figure into perspective, 24 positives in a testing population of about 300 should be ringing the alarm bells when you consider that during the same period positive tests for illicit drugs performed by the Australian Sports Anti- Doping Agency (ASADA) numbered just six in a testing population of thousands. Tell me this is not a worry.

These 24 players have not only escaped any penalty for ‘cheating’ or being ‘addicts’, they have also avoided the prospects of criminal punishment. The junkie in the street should be so 'lucky',  and the issue serves to highlight the AFL's protectionist policy. I am no lawyer, but could the AFL be regarded as accomplices to use and therefore by implication, possession of illegal drugs?

And the NRL, who are considering dropping the three strikes policy to two (which essentially means nothing) have met with dissent. Newcastle Knights CEO Ken Conway, who sought to uphold the original three-strike policy was stated as saying in Sydney's Daily Telegraph ’'….it is a fact of life in today's society that people's drinks get spiked.'’ Are we to believe that any NRL players who test positive, and for that matter all of the 24 AFL players, had their drinks spiked or were held against their will and injected while being restrained? If that’s the case then there is a solution. Don’t let your players go out!

The double standards at play are gallingly obvious and the credibility of the AFL (and NRL) is now on the line. They are embracing a system that has a flagrant disregard for the sporting public and more importantly sporting youth similar to which exists in the NFL in America. But then again, it seems that most of the American sporting public don’t give a damn as long as they are being ‘entertained’. Maybe the AFL and NRL are banking on the same public apathy towards drugs in sport here in Australia. I hope that here we have not caught the same moral schizophrenia that appears to have embedded itself among the American sporting public.