Karmichael Hunt's case might prove to be of a different strain if he is convicted of trafficking, since the law is involved in another context. But so far as the relevance to sport and the players implicated in using those drugs, the principle is the same. It's their choice, and sport has nothing to say about it. A team might, but not a code or its sponsors. It's not even a righteous culture that this corporate squeeze has put on sport; it's just business people riding the white water of a moral wave that broke about 10 years ago when the stigma of cannabis came loose on a puff of smoke somewhere in Washington and never returned. If you walked onto this scene you'd be forgiven for assuming sport was en route to a holy land where drugs are eradicated forever and the sun shed a soft light on things. But that won't happen because drugs and sport is a story that keeps giving. Personal choice is at the heart of it, now in a fight with the corporate jargon trying to dumb it down and straighten you out. But it was never really the idea of clean living that made sport so marketable for big money. Sport was entertaining before footballers could be hair-tested for six-week-old cannabis use. Sport had the public's attention before the price of cocaine made it a drug for the cashed-up stars to prove their class, or the rich kids on the block that went mostly to Catholic schools and came out as sinners and CEOs. It's all this money and big brand protection that has made drug-tested creatures out of regular young sportspeople who are inclined at the same rate as every young person to test things in the world as they move through it.

About a dozen blokes tested positive to banned amphetamines in the AFL last year. That's a low number not because the AFL's angels are guiding us to a better place, but because the game is so professional that its players don't want long nights on amphetamines, and the money and pressure in the game has dictated the rules of living against this. People are fond of suggesting that because sportspeople are role models, hence it is important to steer athletes away from things that might be harmful to young admirers. But if sport must be always caught up in amoral fog, then the best it can do is free itself from the corporate pretence that all drugs are for losers. This sort of nonsense only makes reality harder to bear for young people. Dr Peter Harcourt, the AFL's chief medical officer, has for years framed the league's illicit drugs testing as a method for player welfare. But I was always suspicious of a program that educated against drug use and then went on to test for signs of the same drugs. It didn't feel like welfare. Harcourt said last season at the annual announcement of drug-testing numbers in the AFL: "Cannabis is quite rare in this group. Most of the issues we are dealing with are stimulants." This way of framing everything as an "issue" is reflective of nothing much but the way the wind blows. Now it's not blowing the way of cannabis. Strangely enough, this has happened since the US has legalised marijuana in several states, and the testing methods have improved, discouraging its use among players who might have otherwise done so.

The slippery thing in this scenario is in the law, which has the capacity to change moral assertions in a pen stroke. Consider the outcomes of cannabis use in the US where, as of this moment, you're free to light a joint on the courthouse steps in Washington, Alaska, Oregon and Colorado. Alcohol, an undying example, was once illicit in the US. It would now be considered immoral to ban it. This alone says a lot about institutional suggestions regarding what is right and wrong for an individual.