ONE STRIKE. Two strikes. Three. Five. Nine. A dozen.

It will not matter how many strikes the AFL decrees is the right number to attach to its illicit drugs policy before a player is named publicly, simply because the policy was never designed to "out" a footballer.

While it may be titled the AFL's Illicit Drugs Policy, it is actually an Illicit Drugs Code of Conduct.

There is a massive difference.

Maybe if it had been marketed that way from the moment it was introduced in 2005, the competition itself and the football industry in general would not be experiencing the massive distrust and dislike of the system.

Nor might it be demanding that massive changes are made to it.

A drugs policy, by definition and when applied to world sports organisations, sets out to find and then expose athletes who take drugs.

The AFL's policy, run by private company Dorevitch, does not set out to do anything of the type. It finds enough drug users. In fact it finds way too many. But from there, well, all sorts of things happen which conflict with the definition of a drugs policy.

This view is not a new one of this column. It has been held from the 2005 year Andrew Demetriou and Adrian Anderson, respectively as CEO and football operations manager of the AFL, proudly trumpeted its introduction as "world's best practice".

Any criticism of the policy was met with Demetriou's renowned full-force attack.

The policy was relaunched in 2008, after the unmitigated and West Coast-complicit drugs disaster of Ben Cousins and others, when the captains of the 16 clubs ran a well-publicised and very professional "AFL Players Say No To Drugs" campaign.

Until then, the AFL had largely failed to convince the public there were actually two drugs policies – the performance-enhancing code and the illicit code.

The policy was recalibrated, with the key and loud message being that the policy stood "to protect the health and welfare of AFL players", that the players "volunteered" to be subjected to the policy, and that it was based purely on a medical model.

It was a clever ploy. And an impressive and truthful one. Without the players agreeing to being tested, there would be no policy, and there is no doubt that health and welfare of footballers was a key driving tool behind the entire operation.

But there was also a large dose of AFL image control behind the policy's initial establishment. Drug use had increased dramatically within playing ranks, including cannabis use, and the AFL, rightly in the eyes of many, wanted to be able to steer both player behaviour as well as the public messaging on footballers using drugs.

And there is also no doubt now, that 10 years after the program's introduction, that some illicit drug use among footballers has absolutely nothing to do with a player making a "poor decision" due to a medical condition, and everything to do with a deliberate and calculated social choice.

Within days of the launch of the illicit drugs program, this column was contacted independently by two senior club medicos, who both expressed annoyance with aspects of the program.

One made a claim then that to this day still resonates loudest with this column.

"No player will ever get three strikes under this system," the medico stated as fact.

When asked how this would be the case, the medico said he had asked questions of people in charge of the program and he had been led to believe that certain players who had recorded strikes would be removed from the “official” program and instead be subjected to testing outside of it, which would not be officially recorded against him in the event of a subsequent “positive” test.

Then the facts rolled in to back up that claim. There was a Hawthorn player who said he was unable to provide a urine test for a Dorevitch tester in the early days of this so-called drugs policy. The tester waited and waited until he could wait no longer and let the player escaped without a test.

There were up to six Collingwood footballers who used another loophole, when they "self-reported" after a night out, because they knew that to do so would not allow a "strike" to be recorded against their names.

And a court has heard that twice in early September last year that Hunt, while still an AFL contracted player,  purchased cocaine around times when he was in the company of multiple Suns teammates; the first time being the club's Mad Monday break-up and the second being a golf tour on the Sunshine Coast.

And there are club officials, who despite being banned under the policy from actually being made aware of a player's drug situation, who are indeed well versed on certain players' drug situations under the policy. How do we know this? Certain officials have told us, that's how. There are no secrets in football clubs.

There is no official testing off-season. Hair testing does not count as a strike in the event of a positive result.

Only four weeks ago, another very senior club official rang this column to bemoan of off-season illicit drugs activity at his club that "scares me".

The long-held belief of this column of an unspoken arrangement that sees no player ever being named publicly under the policy has fostered another belief - that this system actually provides a safe harbour for players wanting to take illegal drugs.

Forget the numbers the AFL produces each year. They are just numbers based on very selective testing. If the AFL wants us to really believe that the numbers actually do reflect drug use by players, then it needs to test 365 days a year, commit to testing each player an average 10 times a year, and reveal all results of hair testing.

The only player to record a third-strike under the AFL's illicit drugs policy was Hawthorn's Travis Tuck, but only when police intervened in his life. Tuck already had two strikes, with the police involvement officially being the third strike. The AFL system was not going to "out" Tuck.

And in Tuck's case, that was the right way. He definitely needed the full gamut of health and welfare services provided under the system.

When it is all said and done, the AFL's brief is to run a football competition. Part of that brief, clearly, is to manage drug use by its participants.

The review into the illicit drugs policy is already underway. None of it will be simple.

But it will be easier for everyone if this question is addressed by the League's decision-makers and the players first: are we actually prepared to "out" illicit drug users under this program?

There is no right or wrong answer to that question. But if the answer is "no", the game does not have a right to call the program a drugs policy.

Twitter: @barrettdamian