Time to bang on. The angle to work is that the illicit drugs were being used as performance enhancing substances- Cousins and his midfield cohorts felt that they had 'cracked the code' in terms of building in running power and capacity through their misuse of these drugs; it's the same argument that steroids build in power during sustained work, enabling the user to train longer, harder, and then recover stronger. This is what delivered the on field success in 05/06, before it was unsustainable, and finally blew up in the Eagles faces in 2007.
In short, the 06 flag is more than tainted, it is the direct result of an uneven playing field where one club allowed certain illegal practices to flourish, which, for a short period of time, allowed an on-field advantage which culminated in a premiership it did not deserve. This deserves a direct investigation of all parties retrospectively, couched in the terms of the ability of said illicit substances to produce a performance-enhanced outcome. I can already see the line of numpty medical professionals that WCE will produce to argue the opposite, but the fact is that midfield could produce gut-running unparalleled in the league at that time, and it was not unnoticed by opposition players.
