Are We Losing the War on Drugs in Sport?

Five Canadian Interuniversity football players at a CFL Draft Combine were found to have steroid-like substances in their blood earlier this month. The failed tests will land them four-year athletic bans from the university, but won't impede their CFL careers due to the league's soft stance on performance-enhancing drugs. In Australia, the World Anti-Doping Agency is currently investigating 34 Essendon footballers from the Australian Football League for alleged use of banned peptides, taken during a preseason program in 2012. And then there's Alex Rodriguez, who is back this season after a serving a hefty 162-game suspension for his involvement in the Biogenesis drug scandal.

Urine samples and blood testing methods are lagging, masking drugs are outsmarting testing methods and moving at a rapid rate, while unregulated supplements can be purchased on the web, where it's anyone's guess what chemicals are trapped inside. Doping cases continue in all forms of sport, from elite athletes all the way down the chain to the university level and below.

So, are we losing the war on drugs in sport?

Doping in sport is not new. If anything, there's more of an understanding of how modern day athletes operate in today's society—injections and recovery supplements are more prevalent. One study reported how effective doping would be if PEDs were made legal. "Drugs are against the rules. But we define the rules of sport. If we made drugs legal and freely available, there would be no cheating," author Julian Savulescu wrote. The study did concede there are health risks associated with doping and other kinds of experimentation which is one of the reasons why WADA formed in 2004—to regulate the use of drugs in sport and to provide the world's sporting arenas with athletes who are clean.

At a recent Walrus Talks in Toronto on the subject of PLAY, former WADA president and Canadian Dick Pound spent seven minutes discussing the word "cheating." He spoke of zero tolerance toward cheating in sport and athletes who think it's OK to use PEDs. Pound wrote a report in 2014 about the lack of effectiveness in testing programs and delivered it to WADA with 90 recommendations. It was part of a committee he chaired called The Working Group, a collection of people tasked with the responsibilities of gathering information across all sports and studying positive doping cases since 2001 and the factors that eventually imposed sanctions.

The report cited that despite increased testing and scientific advances to detect more sophisticated substances, anti-doping programs are failing. Even though there are an estimated 250,000 tests conducted annually (an increase of 100,000 tests before WADA was established), the report said there has been no statistical improvement in the number of positive results. The biggest takeaway from the report said the key issues stem from human and political factors, and that there is no appetite to deliver a doping-free sport. Education is meant to arm athletes with good information to make the right decisions, but there's always going to be someone—athlete, coach, parent, pharmacist, sport scientist—pushing the limits to get that extra edge.

More than 660 sport organizations globally have accepted the WADA Code. But WADA's director general David Howman acknowledges it's a colossal undertaking to manage teams of people who monitor sporting practices according to the Code.

"What you have to try to do is find those that are beating the system and are cheating. But detecting the cheats either through collecting samples and analyzing them in labs or by conducting investigations, is a challenging task," he told VICE. "You've got to do this globally, rely on people on the ground in each country to behave in the same fashion."

WADA set up a three-man team headed by Pound in December to investigate allegations made against Russian athletes in a German documentary of boundless doping and cover ups. The independent commission recently requested a whistleblower website to be posted on WADA's website where anyone can leave anonymous information to be investigated further. As of Jan.1, WADA was given "the power of investigation" which gives the anti-doping agency flexibility to gather the information in real time, something needed to deliver sanctions in quick fashion—blood tests and urine samples are simply too time consuming. Also, from the 10 offences of the WADA Code that could warrant a sanction, eight of them are non-analytical and don't rely on a sample collection. Sport must now shift to this new paradigm where investigations will increase due to information given by whistleblowers. But whistleblowing alone won't solve the war on drugs in sport.

Howman said forging partnerships with police departments and government agencies to get access to information that will help provide evidence in breaches of Code will also play a big role in the future. WADA currently relies on information from Interpol and World Customs, along with sport federations and partnerships at a national level.

"We have to continually think like the bad guys," he said. "When you have a bodily sample process you are always going to have people manipulate the samples. You can do stuff with the way you put liquids into your body to manipulate your urine. You can do stuff with having transfusions. We are alert to that. But doing this, we're not going to catch everybody. That's why we're diverting away into other ways of gathering evidence."

As former drug supplier to Marion Jones, Angel Heredia said in an interview with Spiegel Magazine there are drugs that can make anything invisible. There are tablets you can take for the kidneys that block the metabolites of steroids, and thus test negative. There are also chemicals you can digest hours before a race that prevent acidification in the muscles, making it undetectable for doping testers. Athletes can, if they wanted to, find something on the web that can mask just about anything, making WADA's job about as easy as finding a toothpick in a field full of hay bales.

In North America, the Big Four sports, NCAA and CFL operate independently and not under the WADA Code. Howman believes each league's drug testing and education programs don't stack up against WADA's, but did acknowledge Major League Baseball's program is ahead of the other North American sport leagues.

Michael Teevan, MLB's vice president of communications, said the league has expanded its drug-testing efforts in recent times and employs a service that collects samples that get shipped off to a lab in Montreal to be analyzed independently. MLB is the only North American pro sports league to run its own investigations department. The league invests in scientific innovation as a way to assist with illegal doping detection and dishes out some of the heaviest suspensions in sport.

"We come at this from a number of different angles. We realize having a strong drug-testing program is one part of having a successful program," Teevan told VICE. "We believe our program is well-rounded, it reflects the landscape of the issue as a whole. This is the sort of fight that never goes away."

MLB has seen a drop since 2012 in positive drug tests that resulted in suspensions for violating baseball's drug program. In 2012, 113 players received suspensions, a figure that dropped to 75 in 2013. A total of 21,000 urine samples and blood tests were collected in 2014 with 72 players receiving suspensions. Numbers are slowly decreasing, but MLB gave stars like Manny Ramirez (suspended twice in three seasons) and A-Rod (served a record ban of 162 games in 2014) more than one chance to prove themselves instead of implementing a zero-tolerance policy.

Most North American leagues offer little deterrents for players looking to push the limits.

In the CFL, for example, if you get drafted out of university and are carrying a drug violation, it means you incur mandatory testing and must seek counseling. If you fail another test after that you get a three-game ban, a third failed test is a one-year suspension and a fourth will get you life. It takes four rounds of testing over a long period of time to eventually determine that you are cheating the game. Beth Ali, the director of intercollegiate and high performance sport at the University of Toronto, said there needs to be more testing at the university level as it significantly assists with compliance.

"It's a two-pronged approach—it's about education and testing. Need to have both components in order to have success in dealing with an issue that is so serious such as this," she said. "One of the challenges is that they are young people. University sport is generally 18–24 year olds. It's our responsibility to deliver education to people that are young and sometimes make mistakes."

During a Varsity Blues football season there are four or five check points where players, coaches and family members are educated on the illegal use of PEDs. It's a revolving door of continual doping education. Every year someone has found a different way to do something the wrong way, Ali said, and that there needs to be an alternative to do more testing that's not as expensive.

The Canadian Centre of Ethics in Sport confirmed that the cost of a doping control test, on average, is approximately $700 per athlete, which can vary depending on multiple factors. The Varsity Blues football team has 85 players and University of Toronto has 900 varsity athletes in total, which means regular testing is not financially feasible.

"Anytime that you have a sport that can move on to a professional league or an Olympic games you are always going to see athletes who will be trying to find the edge," Ali said. "It's really important that we find a way to make sure that the ones do have the inkling that, that might be a way to take a shortcut to success they need to be educated on the reasons why and what the long terms consequences of doing those types of things are."