How many users in one football club does it take to make a ‘drug culture'? The anonymous weekend allegations about the Sydney Roosters being given Valium which they used recreationally, allegations denied by Braith Anasta and other club leaders, highlight the ongoing cultural gulf between players, administrators, sports media and their public.

It seems that the most dangerous situation for a club is to be identified as having a ‘drug culture' - not because of the health of the young men involved, but because of the reputational and financial impact on the club itself.

Club officials don't have a proud record of understanding illicit drug use. For the most part, they just don't get it. What they do get is that there is now an accepted strategic path for abdicating responsibility.

The orthodox view is that if a player went out and took illicit drugs with his non-football mates, then that would not constitute a ‘drug culture' at his club. Extending the logic of this, you could have a club where a great number of players were regular drug users, yet if they did so privately (but not necessarily secretly) then the club could not be held responsible. This was how the West Coast Eagles administration forgave themselves in the wash-up of the Ben Cousins affair: players were doing this on their own time, so it wasn't the club's business.

The trouble with this kind of thinking mushrooms the more you mull it over. First, it provides a perverse incentive for a club to continue to turn a blind eye: the longer it can ignore drug use, sideline as the extracurricular hobby of rogue players, the better the club can position itself to deny it ever had a ‘drug culture'. So ‘Don't ask, don't tell' is in the club's interests.

Until the shit hits the fan. As the Cousins business showed, eventually it was a matter for the football club to deal with. But why, when there was no ‘drug culture' involving the club itself? Having dodged any notion of duty of care, the Eagles were then bound to cut him loose on the pretext of missed training sessions and a breached contract, because his problems were damaging their interests. And there lay a second perverse incentive in evading their duty of care, for to show themselves strongly ‘anti-drug', the club had to make a big deal of cutting the miscreant player loose.

In Andrew Johns's case, the Newcastle Knights got away with turning their blind eye, because his long-term drug use didn't become public until after his retirement. But when current players Danny Wicks and Chris Houston were later charged with drug offences, the club cut them out like cancers, lest the individuals taint the organization. Again, the unofficial policy was ‘We don't want to know, but if we do find out, we'll wash our hands of you.'

It seems to me that these clubs are in a transitional moment between sporting bodies and corporations. In sporting clubs - or am I idealising this? - if players are misbehaving, or have a health problem, then everyone knows about it and eventually it must be dealt with. That's what clubs are about: looking after your own. You may not do it well, you may settle it with fists or feuds, but you confront it, in the haphazard but well-meaning way that we like to think families operate, because you can't live with each other unless you do.

Corporations, on the other hand, are all about a ‘greater good', being the health of the corporation itself. So if there's a problem, the usual corporate tactic is to identify a scapegoat and outmanoeuvre him so he cops the blame, while the corporate officers protect the business's good name and cover their own backsides. That's the way we're getting used to football clubs dealing, or failing to deal, with the drugs issue: the players are disposable, limbs to be amputated when they grow visibly diseased. In a weird way, it's a flipside of how increasing numbers of players, and their agents, treat clubs: these are businesses, not living, breathing community organisms.

So do the Roosters have a ‘drug culture'? That seems to be an arid question. What's certain is that there are players at the Roosters, and at every other professional football club, who take drugs recreationally. Some are dabblers, some have problems, and some are on the pathway in-between. And the more their clubs see themselves as business entities, the more those young people's fates will be left to chance.