Crime cartels target Generation Selfie

Teens wanting to look good for school formals or boost stamina for the weekend footy match are being targeted by crime gangs, notably bikies, as part of the lucrative trade in performance and image-enhancing drugs.

Body-conscious teens and school-aged sports stars are being targeted by organised crime groups with performance and image-enhancing drugs.

Whether to look good for school formals or boost stamina for the weekend footy match, teenagers are seeking performance enhancers, effectively linking them with criminal gangs trafficking narcotics.

The revelation comes as the Federal Government agrees to create a new single sports integrity agency with powers to probe doping, drug use and match fixing across all sport levels and critically link codes and law enforcement agencies to drive crime out of sport.

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ASADA chief executive David Sharpe. Picture: Gary Ramage

Australian Sports and Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) chief David Sharpe, who is central to pulling all the agencies into the newly created Sport Integrity Australia, said the sports industry clean-up had to start at the grassroots with education campaigns.

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The former Australian Federal Police assistant commissioner and Canberra Raiders NRL player said the new body would go someway to combat the rising trend of drug cartels, notably Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, now targeting youth as part of broader criminal activity.

“If you look at Australia, we are already a very lucrative market for illicit drugs but it also is for the performance enhancing drugs,” he told True Crime Australia.

“There is evidence of organised crime infiltration importing of illicit drugs and back-ending in loads of illicit drugs with performance enhancers. We already work closely with the AFP and Australian Border Force on those sorts of imports and organised crime infiltration so really this is now just about greater co-ordination in the effort.

“Organised crime are importing performance enhancing drugs at all levels and not just sport but community. There is evidence of young kids who want to look good and bulk up for their school formal, they are getting these things online, getting them through illicit means and whenever you see people accessing that they’ve got to have had, obviously, a link to organised crime. You don’t use illicit drugs socially if you are not buying them off someone, which then creates a vulnerability, you are then exposed.”

Vials from an Australian Border Force seizure of $4.5 million worth of performance and image enhancing drugs. Picture: ABF

That exposure particularly in sport has already seen promising careers ruined at the junior elite level right up into adult premier leagues. But he said, ridiculously, for some it was as much about image enhancing as sports performance.

“That’s why they call them performance and image-enhancing,” Mr Sharpe said. “The kids see it as a shortcut to an image and looking good, yet they are not taking into account the health impact or where the substances are coming from … that’s where this integrity body has a big role to play in education as well, which will be a critical focus of it.”

The Government this week accepted the bulk of recommendations from Justice James Wood’s report into sport integrity, looking at ways to better clean up codes at all levels, notably the use of supplements in AFL and NRL, offshore-directed match fixing and illegal betting.

His overall finding was the need for a one-stop-shop integrity body to protect Australian sports from threats. Mr Sharpe said his priority was now co-ordinating engagement between law enforcement, including the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), Home Affairs Department agencies, betting agencies and sports codes.

“It is actually what is well-needed in Australia, government coming to the table to support sports, some that have lots of money and the majority don’t or ability to conduct integrity roles or investigation, so this is bringing it all together,” he said.