Sport: Drugs

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to prevent the use of image and performance enhancing drugs in amateur and junior sport.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I put down this debate a good few months ago. The matters under discussion, and certainly my awareness of them, seem to have grown between then and now. I initially spoke about amateur sport and drug taking because I was receiving increasing amounts of information that amateur sport, and particularly rugby union, was finding an increasing number of people who were testing positive, particularly in the lower grades. I may be being a little unfair to my own sport, in which I still occasionally run out—although I have a nagging suspicion that the games I am playing in now are probably not the primary target for drug misuse at any level. However, it is a sport that encourages body mass, dynamic explosion and strength, as these are huge advantages when it is played at a competitive level.

The attitude of the sport seemed to be that it was not a big problem because it was all about gym bunnies who were into building themselves up, but that it was extending testing down the leagues. There are all sorts of implications of that: if it is only a few people and they are casual players, why are they putting in testing further down? Clearly there is a danger that drugs are getting into types of amateur sport. Some people have taken it seriously and put good programmes in place. Canoeing, rowing and cycling have been recommended to me and have been given a pat on the back from UK Anti-Doping.

As this debate approached and I started asking around for briefings, I got a series of communications from UKAD which made me think that my original title might be a little narrow. The only change I felt I could make was to add in image-enhancing drugs. I am talking about amateur sports, but it is quite clear that I am catching the edge of a bigger problem. Steroids, and other drugs like them, have become part of a fashion revolution to get people bigger and stronger. The easiest way to do that, and to enhance your image, is to use steroids. This affects sport in a certain way, but the evidence is incredibly difficult to gather. By its nature, these are amateur sportsmen who are not, in most cases, contractually bound. You cannot get at them; you cannot test them all the time; and a lot of the evidence is anecdotal.

What we have discovered is that the availability of performance-enhancing and image-enhancing drugs is incredibly wide—I would say almost endemic. You cannot go anywhere near this field without finding them available. I asked, but got very little support on, a question about the actual medical damage done to people who take them. When doing my own research, I discovered an article on a website which happened to be linked to somebody who was supplying drugs. It was very informative and said that oral steroids, in particular, are very bad for your kidneys and encourage cirrhosis of the liver: it is not surprising that they damage you. As I was going through the site, little flashes were coming up saying that somebody had purchased. There were three purchases in the London area in 10 minutes. So what comes across is how readily available these things are—and how it is almost impossible to find out what is going on. It is getting more complicated all the time; that is the problem we are hitting.

What can the Government do to support these sports and their governing bodies? It is clear that, at the moment, the huge amounts of money and effort that would be required for a coherent strategy are simply not available. Clubs often rely on amateur structures and they do not have the money to undertake coherent testing. They are dependent on the governing bodies, which would rather spend it on something else. How far down do you go? If casual use is coming in, what do you do? This is becoming incredibly difficult to play out. The only people who can take a coherent position at the top—on education, for a start—are the Government, and more has to be done.

There are lots of lists of nasty side-effects from acquiring muscle mass by using steroids and the other drugs that come into this. Acne is common for males and females; hair loss on the head; shrinkage of the genitals—not great fun; and the development of breasts. These are possibly not the best things to enhance your image. In the long term, and more seriously, there is an increased danger of heart attacks and kidney and liver failure. But there is still a lack of information behind simple statements that this is happening and this is nasty. We know that this type of campaign has to have something more behind it. You have to have somebody telling you that there is more to this and some way of enforcing compliance with sticks or carrots. At the moment there seems to be a combination of: “It’s somebody else’s problem; it’s not really us; we haven’t found anything”—though all the information suggests that you are not finding it because you have no way of testing and nobody has the incentive to look that hard and find out what is going on—and, “It’s too difficult”. Unless more information is made available about the damage being done, such as platelets in the blood causing heart attacks and strokes, you will not have an effective tool to get on the education pathway.

Another problem is that many of these drugs are taken by injection. All the problems associated with injecting any form of drug then come into play. Hepatitis C, HIV, you name it: everything that is tied in with needle sharing is there. There are also behavioural problems— “roid rage”, I think it is called—and a great increase in the amount that people drink when they take steroids. So it is a confused picture.

I now come to probably the only bit that might get reported, which is the fact that gym culture is being personified and built up in the public mind. There comes a time when certain TV programmes capture the national zeitgeist or are seen to be the symbol of everything that is wrong; I am afraid that “Love Island”, on ITV, seems to be the one that has got us here. So far, we have had complaints here, which have been followed through and acted on, about selling plastic surgery and excessive smoking on the programme. But it also personifies the gym and “body beautiful” culture that we have been talking about. UKAD wrote to the producers on 2 August of this year to ask what they were going to do about it, because one contestant on the programme, Frankie Foster, had been banned from playing rugby because of a doping offence. To date it has still not received a reply. Surely the Minister can tell us what the Government are doing to encourage those TV producers and everybody else to intervene there.

If you are saying that it is great to go for the gym body look, with everything else—often you will have to take other drugs to cover up some of the side-effects of the steroids or other bodybuilding drugs you are using—surely that cannot be right. We are just starting to see the tip of this situation. Can we please find out what the Government are doing to try to get further into it?