Frankly Speaking

By Frank Uryasz, President, Drug Free Sport™

New drug-education tool adds to the "one-two punch"

Drug Free Sport believes that drug education and drug testing go hand in hand. So, we’re very excited about our involvement in the continued development and distribution of myPlaybook, an innovative Web-based drug and alcohol prevention program for student-athletes. You can learn more about myPlaybook in this quarter’s Drug Free Sport Insight.

Drug Free Sport promotes the value of education in deterring athletes’ use of drugs and we wanted to expand the educational offerings we provide our clients. We know that Drug Free Sport is well known for its drug and supplement speakers (www.drugfreesport.com/services/speakers-bureau) and for the Resource Exchange Center (REC) (www.drugfreesport.com/rec) and we wanted to develop a Web-based tool to complement the REC and our on-site speakers. We found what we were looking for in myPlaybook.

What I like about myPlaybook is that its developers understand athletes, and they have created a tool that has been validated on college-age athletes; it has proven to work. You’ll be hearing more from Drug Free Sport about myPlaybook after the first of the year, but we encourage you to contact us now if improving your drug-education programs was on your 2009 to-do list

One of the challenges we face in drug prevention in sport is that some want to frame the discussion as “testing versus education.” It doesn’t have to be this way. Education is the foundation of prevention. But education is imperfect. Imperfect in the sense that despite our best educational efforts, some athletes will choose to use banned supplements, drugs, methods, devices, etc., to gain an unfair advantage. Should we jettison education because it isn’t perfect? Of course not.

Testing is imperfect. The threat of being sanctioned for a positive test doesn’t affect every athlete’s behavior. If it did, we wouldn’t have positive drug tests. Yet we know from numerous surveys that a large percentage of athletes acknowledge that the threat of testing influences their decision not to use. Testing is imperfect in other ways. Not everyone is tested, so we miss some users. Imperfect because sometimes suspicious samples are called “negative” because of weaknesses in our knowledge base. Critics of drug testing cite these limitations as reasons not to test. So, similar question, should we jettison drug testing because it isn’t perfect? Of course not.

I see education and testing as the one-two punch of the drug preventionists. Will we get a knock out every time? No. Yet, by doing both, we get a lot closer to safe, equitable competition for our athletes than we would if we had to choose between the two.

As we near the end of 2009, Drug Free Sport remains thankful for the opportunity to work with our clients as their trusted advisor in the area of drug-use prevention for their athletes.