LONDON: The player unions representing footballers and cricketers in England have called for recreational drugs to be removed from the World Anti-Doping Agency's prohibited list. Rather than punishing athletes who test positive for cocaine and marijuana during in-competition testing with a two-year ban for a first offense, the groups are appealing for leniency with a focus on rehabilitation. “We have to make sure that a guy struggling with a problem can step forward and receive help to get that issue addressed without the possibility of being suspended or - even worse than that - losing his contract,” John Bramhall, deputy chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, told The Associated Press Monday. “For the number of players who have tested positive for cocaine, the consequences are far from performance-enhancing and the outcomes in the majority of cases have been very negative.” Ian Smith, the Professional Cricketers' Association's legal director, agreed that recreational drug use isn't usually about gaining an unfair advantage. “Marijuana is not a big issue with cheating in sport - let's get it off the (WADA) list,” he said. West Bromwich Albion striker Roman Bednar received a three-month suspension last year for possessing recreational drugs. In rugby union, England international Matt Stevens is currently serving a two-year ban for testing positive for cocaine on a match day. In one of sport's most notorious cases of recreational drug use, Romania striker Adrian Mutu was banned for seven months and fired by Chelsea after testing positive for cocaine in 2004. A lengthy legal process concluded earlier this year with a court ordering Mutu to pay Chelsea ($27m) in compensation. Mutu is suspended after receiving a separate nine-month ban for failing two drug tests for a banned stimulant. Bramhall wants football to be allowed to address the underlying social problems that lead to players using party drugs. “We need to look at a method for football to deal with those issues, but take the sanctions and the punitive nature of those sanctions away from the players to give them the opportunity to do that,” Bramhall said on the sidelines of a conference in London. “We accept that in some sports, cocaine could be used for performance-enhancing. But within football, I think it is a social issue more than anything else and the backgrounds players come from and the use in their social environments.”
