Sport: Drugs

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for raising this vitally important area of key sports policy.

Your Lordships may recall that at the time of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012, Tina and Chris Dear set up the Matthew Dear Foundation. Tina Dear focused on the fact that any parent with a child who takes anabolic steroids should be aware that the drugs can be highly dangerous and addictive. Long-term use can lead to aggressive behaviour, mood swings, liver or kidney tumours, strokes, heart attacks, or worse. Tina Dear knows just how devastating the drugs can be. Her son Matthew was 17 when the young cadet started taking steroids in an attempt to “bulk up” and become a Royal Marine, but within weeks, he was dead. While the post-mortem was inconclusive, Tina believed that the muscle-building drugs, which he bought illegally, caused his brain to swell. He died just three months before he could take the selection test.

There have been many such deaths: drugs taken to enhance performance without proper medical supervision, taken through drug rings around body-building gymnasiums. Tina Dear said:

“It just makes you realise that the message needs to be put out there that these drugs are dangerous. A lot of these youngsters who take steroids don’t see them as drugs—they think they’re some kind of supplement and don’t see them as dangerous. It’s important to raise awareness and show these youngsters they can still achieve the body they want the healthy, natural way, without steroids”.


The noble Lord, Lord Addington, has highlighted the importance of that issue. Tina and her husband now run the Matthew Dear Foundation, which does vitally important work for hundreds of young people who have suffered as a result of taking a range of performance-enhancing drugs.

I will pick up on one of the points the noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned, by looking at the academic work that has been done to emphasise just how serious this issue has become. The use of anabolic-androgenic steroids—AASs, as they are called—by professionals and recreational athletes is increasing, not just in this country but worldwide. The underlying motivations are, as the noble Lord said, mainly performance enhancement and body image. AAS-using athletes frequently present with psychiatric symptoms and disorders, mainly somatoform and eating disorders, but also mood and schizophrenia-related disorders. They are also unfortunately linked to psychotic behaviour the length and breadth of this country. In fact, AAS use is no longer limited to a small number of athletes, bodybuilders or weightlifters, but currently extends to the general population, including young people, probably because of the highly competitive nature of school and college sport. In the States, Welder and Melchert reported that over half a million high school students have taken AASs for non-medical purposes. This raises serious concerns regarding the numerous adverse effects of these substances.

There are many such cases. The facts, as evidenced by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, are that steroids have increasingly become the key issue for young men, who have gained access to them over the internet. The council has gone so far as to call for a ban on their sale from the hundreds of overseas websites that deliberately target users across Britain. Chief drugs adviser Professor Les Iversen says:

“At the moment, information is much too easily available. The material available online is often contaminated”,


which of course is dangerous in its own right. If you search online, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has, and I did earlier today once again, you will see endless offers. As Professor Iversen says, a ban on importation,

“would have a considerable dampening effect on demand”.

I understand that it may be difficult to enforce, but it would act as a simple deterrent.

These steroids are manufactured to mimic the effect of the male hormone testosterone, and are taken to increase muscle mass and athletic performance. As I said, they can be highly addictive, and many of the performance-enhancing substances can also have serious side-effects, including infertility, an increased risk of prostate cancer, splayed teeth, high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes, and tumours. They can also cause mood swings and hallucinations.

Even here, figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, published by the Home Office, estimate that 50,000 people in the UK use steroids to train harder and quickly build muscle. But researchers quite rightly claim that the real number could be far higher, because many people do not openly admit to using them. The real growth has come in young users who want to improve their body image, and steroids sit in the legal grey area between a medicine and a banned recreational drug.

Again, that point of body image was picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, when he referred to the 2018 season of “Love Island”, which featured, as he mentioned, Frankie Foster, a former rugby player, now a fitness coach and a star on the show, who was previously banned for 18 months from his sport for having tested positive for steroids. Television has a vital role to play, and a responsibility. It must understand that the impact this programme unwittingly has to date is to develop role models not to inspire good example, but in this case to damage lives.

To come back to sport, the rugby union point is important, and it is the area where we have the highest number of image and performance-enhancing drugs—IPED—cases. UKAD is doing excellent work in this area. It recognises that a key area in the anti-doping landscape is the risk and vulnerability surrounding young athletes transitioning to senior sport from the amateur ranks. Of course, many of those in transition are in higher education or universities, and too often, university gyms are the breeding grounds for banned performance-enhancing drugs. Many are unsupervised, with poor educational programmes, easy access to the drugs, a near total absence of spot testing, a lack of education and poor medical advice. They are the breeding grounds for far too many young people who want to migrate into the professional ranks of sport. They are also exceptionally dangerous, because in many respects, the lack of education means that the opportunity to access contaminated drugs is increased.

UKAD has a very good programme, called the Clean Sport Accreditation Scheme, which recognises higher and further education institutions that meet a set of minimum standards towards their anti-doping obligations. But only three universities are currently fully accredited, with an additional 25 colleges and universities in the accreditation process. I ask the Minister—not necessarily in his response, but following this debate—to look at whether more work can be done and more funding supported and directed towards this initiative, because there is a need to prioritise the work that UKAD is doing with universities in this area.

I have often argued—and I take this opportunity again to make the point—that using performance-enhancing drugs in sport should be a criminal offence, and should apply as a criminal offence only in circumstances where an athlete knowingly takes a prohibited substance with the intention of enhancing his or her performance, or where a member of an athlete’s entourage encourages or assists an athlete in taking such a substance. Both the criminal offence and any sporting sanctions should apply simultaneously. This aims to enhance drug-free sport and create an awareness among young people that, if they start taking performance-enhancing drugs, they face potential criminal sanctions. It also would create a level playing field among athletes and would move English law into line with other European countries and fully recognise—as many people on all sides of this House recognise—that doping in sport to achieve competitive advantage through cheating is no different to defrauding a fellow athlete and should be covered by the same criminal sanctions as those applicable to fraud.

Finally, I ask the Minister wherever possible to highlight the importance of clean athletes being party to this debate. Beckie Scott, athlete committee chair for the World Anti-Doping Agency—WADA—claimed recently that she was bullied by Olympic movement officials at the meeting that saw WADA controversially reinstate Russia. It is vital that there be no opportunity, ever, for bullying members of athletes’ commissions at whatever level—governing bodies, the International Olympic Committee or indeed WADA. I hope the Minister can fully support Beckie Scott and, through her, all athletes who want to participate fully and to be listened to in this critically important debate.