League: Players and clubs battle binge-drinking culture

The alcohol-fuelled dumping of former Warriors Tevita Latu and Misi Taulapapa are the tip of what appears be an iceberg of binge-drinking and drug-taking among league players.

Latu, who moved across the Tasman to play for Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks in this year's NRL Telstra Premiership, was banned from the sport after breaking a woman's nose in an early-morning assault at a Sydney service station.

Taulapapa was dropped from the Warriors after a number of alcohol-related incidents and now plays for the Central Comets in north Queensland, a club that has also had a recent series of embarrassing incidents with after-hours revelry by its players.

The latest Rugby League Week annual players' poll shows the two players are part of a booze-and-drugs culture that continues to pervade league despite increasingly tough measures introduced in the wake of such scandals as the alleged sexual assault of a woman by six Bulldogs' players after a pre-season match in Coffs Habour two years ago.

No charges were laid, but the incident unleashed a wave of similar alcohol- and drug-related complaints.

The poll of 100 players from every NRL club, including the Warriors and Kiwis playing in Australia, reports that 29 per cent knew of other players using such drugs as marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy - with little fear of detection.

No league player has tested positive for recreational drugs since dual international Andrew Walker admitted using cocaine in 2004.

Walker, who played for both the Kangaroos and the Wallabies, quit the game.

Yet between 1989 and 2005 more than 800 league players were tested for drugs, with 166 tests on game days and 374 out of competition in 2004-05.

In the new poll, 85 players said that had been drug-tested between one and five times this year, but were not worried.

One player told Rugby League Week: "If you are tested on Friday night, blokes see it as a green light to party the rest of the weekend. It's not as if they are going to come and test you again 24 hours later."

The magazine's editor Martin Lenehan said he had been surprised at the extent of drugs and binge-drinking revealed in the poll and that the NRL needed to look carefully at its testing regime.

"It's obviously something the players think about," he said.

"They go to a lot of parties and see what other guys are doing , and I suppose because they can speak freely in this poll they are prepared to be very honest about it."

Alcohol also remains a major problem for the sport, with 63 conceding a culture of binge-drinking existed within the sport, and a similar number prepared to accept clubs breath-testing before training.

Yet 92 of the players believed they should be role models for the young.

"They feel like they should be role models, and they are happy to be (so), but some of the admissions about drinking and drugs aren't exactly what you would be expect of role models," Lenehan said.