THE two-headed monster that was the AFL's drugs policy is growing. It suddenly has a third head and another mutated appendage. As well as a performance-enhancing drugs policy and an illicit drugs policy, there's now a Ben Cousins policy. Not only that, but commercial sponsors have joined the AFL in having a say over who is fit to play the game.

Yet again, the AFL Players Association has cause to ask itself whether it truly understood what it was letting itself in for when it chose to invite particular scrutiny of its players over illicit drugs. Clearly, the answer is that it didn't. It didn't sense that the massive concession it granted in embracing an illicit drug-testing program would quickly be re-interpreted as a matter of duty by administrators, media and public. It didn't consider the possibility that information gained from such testing might one day leak to the media. It still doesn't seem to understand that by committing its players to illicit drug tests within a high-profile workplace, it inevitably opens the outcome of such testing to legitimate media and public curiosity. It clearly didn't foresee that at some point - whether due to political pressure or a shifting of the ground - the AFL might simply change the rules, as it has done in relation to Cousins.

The AFLPA must now see the truth of the maxim, "give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile". It has, for reasons one suspects are not unrelated to the fact that it must bargain with the AFL on remunerative working conditions, given the game's administration unconscionable power over its membership. Now the AFL has imposed conditions on one individual that are probably unprecedented in world sport. On the kindest possible analysis, the AFL and AFLPA, in a misguided zeal to establish their competition as some new-age social model, have failed to recognise the pitfalls of formally subjecting a part of players' private lives to the scrutiny of a sports administration.

The AFL has succeeded in creating such confusion about the quite separate issues of performance-enhancing drugs and illicit drugs that if you listen to the public conversation, even among otherwise intelligent people, the impression is that there is only one issue. Drugs. They are abhorrent (a great word in this discussion) and anyone who touches them deserves little, if any, sympathy. This is expressed with particular potency in sections of the media. So much for not stigmatising those touched by this most difficult and torturous of human problems.

There even continues to be a suggestion that West Coast won its 2006 premiership illegitimately. On the evidence before us, this is nonsense, but the blurring of the lines created by the two policies has given it currency. West Coast's flag was certainly no less legitimate than Hawthorn's seven weeks ago. Moreover, it was no less legitimate than Melbourne's in 1956 or Carlton's in 1906. The only difference between then and now is that the modern game is played in a broad sporting environment where the threat of drug cheating exists. That's why drug-testing programs came into existence, and the World Anti-Doping Authority protocol specifically differentiates, for good reason, between out-of-competition and match-day usage of drugs such as those to which Cousins became addicted.

Sport has had a crisis on its hands for 35 years or more with performance-enhancing drugs. Every responsible sports administration in the world has had to fight zealously to try to ward them off. Insofar as sport is threatened by drug-taking athletes, it is the user of performance-enhancers, the one who cheats and defrauds fellow athletes and public alike, thus threatening the fabric and credibility of his or her industry, who must be cracked down upon with full ferocity.

If and when Ben Cousins resumes his AFL career, he could be tested for illicit drugs as many as 150 times in a year. Over the same period, the AFL, under its WADA code testing program, which is designed to ensure that its game is free of performance-enhancing drugs, will perform approximately 500 tests on its 700 players. The AFL pays the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Agency for the quantity of testing the league considers appropriate and that is what it estimates to be a suitable number. So: 500 tests to protect the entire competition from real drug cheats, 150 tests to protect it from one man's problem with his own addiction. It is so misguided that were it not for the anguished human component of the story, it would almost be funny.

Amid the hue and cry over the Cousins affair, Thursday's sports section of The Age carried a revealing headline: "Cousins on notice over hair length". It has come to this. A sports administration now feels empowered to impose on a player an instruction as to how much hair he is required to have. This - it must be emphasised - has nothing to do with checking whether or not he is a drug cheat. It is simply to determine whether or not he should be regarded as a suitable person to play elite-level football.

Beware a monster at large. It has three heads, an aberrant appendage, and is now becoming hairy.