ABSTRACT
Drug control-led integrity management for sport has proven to be a difficult undertaking. Part of the difficulty lies in the privileged structural antidoping hegemony (see Chapter 3 and 4), which inhibits the capacity for top-down (e.g. alternative paradigms) or bottom-up (e.g. market led responses) innovation in the management of drugs in sport (Mazanov, 2014). Innovation in sports drug control has so far come as conceptual policy discussion such as Stewart and Smith’s (2014) manifesto. These discussions tend to omit detail of what the management of drugs in sport might look like under policy alternatives, failing to deliver an administrative framework for ‘second generation drug control’ (Mazanov & Connor, 2010). An attempt is made to begin operationalising harm-minimisation as the most mature of the alternative policy approaches emerging from the drugs in sport debate (see Chapter 4). A set of assumptions that guide the alternative are established, followed by how those assumptions might be put into practice exploiting existing systemic governance mechanisms introduced to give effect to anti-doping (see Chapter 7). The implications of this approach are then discussed. Recognising that drug control is always a matter of trading harms (Weatherburn, 2008), the potentially negative outcomes arising from the implementation of harm-minimisation are considered. This consideration points out that, like anti-doping, a harmminimisation approach to managing drugs in sport leads to a set of wicked problems. In doing so, it raises an important question about which of the two approaches is more likely to better manage integrity for sport.
