Youth's drug first
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Jamie Hughes, a Tranmere trainee, has become the first English player to be charged with using a performance-enhancing drug after testing positive for amphetemines in a random test.
The 17-year-old YTS trainee is protesting his innocence, claiming a drink must have been spiked on a night out.
The Football Association, waging a major crackdown on drug abuse, accept there was no attempt to boost his game but are not convinced by his explanation and have charged him, under Rule 26A, with bringing the game into disrepute.
Hughes' misfortune is another example of the threat the widespread availability of social drugs poses to the game. "We believe the boy is a victim of a modern scourge and we're very saddened by it," the Tranmere chairman, Frank Corfe, said.
Gordon Taylor, head of the players' union, has already seen the Arsenal player, Paul Merson, confess to cocaine and alcohol abuse, while the Crystal Palace striker, Chris Armstrong, has been trapped using cannabis.
But it is the use of recreational drugs among youngsters like Hughes which most worries him. The Charlton teenagers, Dean Chandler and Lee Bowyer, were named for cannabis abuse recently.
"There is a culture out there and we would be naive to think it doesn't affect youngsters in football," Taylor said. "But we have to get our message across to them that drugs and football simply do not go.''
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