The Treatment of Matt Stevens

To the dismay of rugby union betting fans, the Bath and England prop, Matt Stevens, has tested positive for a recreational drug and is likely to be banned from playing for two years. In that time he will miss the Lions tour of South Africa, his native country, and lose the opportunity to gain over twenty Rugby Union England caps. The substance, believed to be cocaine, is deemed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to infringe each of the three criteria used to determine whether or not a drug should be on the banned list. These are that it is shown to be performance enhancing, that it goes against the spirit of sport and that it damages the health of the athlete. If any two of these are met then the substance is banned. On that basis, it is difficult to understand how smoking gets through the net. Perhaps it’s because it is legal.

It’s hard to see how cocaine can be performance enhancing. It is by no means accepted to be so by many experts in the field. In any case, it would appear that Stevens has conceded that he has a problem with the drug and has sought help through drug-counselling agencies. He has presumably had to conceal this from the Rugby Union authorities because of the inflexible consequences to his career. Now that it is known, do the authorities contact the drug counsellors and ask in what way they can pitch in and help? No, they seem set to tell their unfortunate prop that their contribution to his problem is to deprive him of much that is positive in his life as well as cut off his income. These actions could not be better designed to push someone further into their negative behaviour.

I’ve argued very strongly in the past that cheating in sport, by the use of performance enhancing drugs, should be met with the harshest of penalties. There must be flexibility, however, and what is needed here is an injection of wisdom into the equation. The man has clearly recognised his problem and has tried to remedy it. The authorities should be able to find a way to work positively with this situation so that counselling can continue while daily testing could be carried out and a chance to change be granted before he is cast out into the wilderness and left to his own devices.

Effects on the body are short lived and produce patterns of discoordination. Sleep is affected and confusion and paranoia can be induced – hardly performance enhancing. And if cocaine goes against the spirit of sport, what about smoking? This is also far more damaging to the health of the user. In other words, if cocaine was legal, it would almost certainly not be on the banned drug list.