‘Bring back three strikes’
THE architect of the league’s first illicit drugs policy says the best way to reduce harmful drug-taking in the AFL would be to reinstate a three-strikes framework.
It comes as the AFL’s integrity team interviewed Western Bulldogs star Bailey Smith on Tuesday as his coach Luke Beveridge called for the league to abandon the drugs policy.
In a fierce defence of the league’s regulations, former AFL doctor Harry Unglik said the league never covered up a player who hit three strikes during the life of that policy.
The three-strikes policy introduced in 2005 was updated to two strikes in 2016 and, while players with a second strike are to be suspended for four matches, no player has reached that threshold.
Unglik said the illicit drugs policy changed player behaviours and funnelled players with dangerous drug habits into a medical model with rigorous drug testing that saved lives. Unglik served as the AFL’s chief medical doctor for 16 years and the North Melbourne
club doctor between 1983 and 2001 during two premierships. He is now a Roos board member.
He said the AFL’s medical model that guards players with mental health issues was significantly misunderstood, adamant players in that program were repeatedly drug-tested to ensure they rectified their issues.
“The reason it was brought in in the first place was WADA didn’t have a policy for out-ofcompetition testing for illicit drugs like cocaine and ecstasy and marijuana, and we felt the emerging fashion with young people was to drink less alcohol and take more drugs, so we thought it was a good idea to bring in a policy of harm minimisation,” he said.
“The whole purpose was not to blame and shame but to support and help kids. If you picked up a kid with drugs in the community you wouldn’t put his name in the newspaper, you would put him in a program and help him, so that was the aim.
“Unfortunately a lot of pressure was put on myself and (fellow AFL medical expert) Peter Harcourt to make it a two-strikes policy and to make it a bit more punitive.
“I didn’t aspire to it or agree to it, but (under the medical model) we put people into programs, we gave them psychological help and counselling and the one thing no one seems to mention is we used to test them much more rigorously. We were able to help a lot of kids who might have gone down the wrong path.”
News Corp reported on Sunday Smith would concede his cocaine use in October ahead of an AFL penalty for “conduct unbecoming” that could be two weeks.
Former St Kilda coach Grant Thomas said on Tuesday “probably 90 per cent” of players had tried illicit drugs and called on the league to abandon the policy.
Unglik left the AFL in 2017 as the league’s two-strikes policy saw players with a second strike fined, outed and suspended for four weeks.
Asked what he would do under an official review of the policy, he said: “My opening statement was this is all about harm minimisation.’’