CRAIG CHALMERS, the former Scottish rugby international and British Lion whose son is soon to complete a two-year ban from rugby for doping, has criticised the Scottish Rugby Union for failing to take the opportunity to learn from the incident.

The 46 year-old also expressed his belief that doping in rugby is "rife".

In May 2013, while on duty with the Scotland Under 20s squad ahead of a Test with Ireland, Chalmers' son, Sam, tested positive for methandienone and stanozolol, both of which are listed as anabolic androgenic steroids on the list of prohibited substances by the World Anti-Doping Authority. Chalmers was just 19 at the time and admitted to taking a pill called Pro-SD in an attempt to bulk-up.

The implication of Sam's positive test was a two-year ban which comes to an end this month but his father has expressed his disappointment that the SRU did not take the opportunity to learn more from his son about doping in rugby and the reasons why players make the choice to dope.

Sam has done a considerable amount of work with the world governing body, the IRB, during his time out from the game, including appearing in an educational anti-doping video and talking to young players about his experience.

"Sam will come back from this episode more mature and a wiser person from it but he's done it all on his own," Chalmers says. "He's had no help from anyone other than support from family and friends. To be fair, Melrose have been pretty supportive but they can only do so much. The SRU have shown no support at all though - there's not been any kind of attempt to try to find out why Sam did it and that disappoints me a lot because he's young, he made a mistake and I think that if I was the head of a sport in a country and I'd seen what Sam had done, I'd be wanting to know why and what made him do it. Maybe it's nothing to do with them but . . ."

Chalmers, who coached Melrose after his playing career ended, also said that he believes his son is not the first player to have taken steroid pills either in an attempt to make physical gains or merely just to improve their appearance. "The thing with doping in rugby is that it goes on, I know it goes on," he says. "I hadn't really thought about it that much before Sam's case but then I began asking some people about the stuff that Sam had taken and they seemed to say that it was rife."

Chalmers claim that doping is prevalent in rugby is not unfounded. Of the 48 people currently on the UK Anti-Doping list of sanctioned individuals, 27 are from rugby- 18 of them coaches or athletes from rugby union. Last year, Ian Ritchie, the chief executive of England's governing body, the RFU, admitted that the sport had an issue with drugs that need to be urgently tackled. In addition to Ritchie's comments, the newly-appointed chief of UKAD, Nicole Sapstead, vowed recently to look at the worrying increase in teenage steroid use in sport and said that one of her prime objectives will be to focus on the increased use of steroids by aspiring athletes in rugby, as well as other sports.

"I suspect that many people take this steroid because they want the gains, whether it's to play sport- at any level- or it might just be to look good," Chalmers says. "So I think I'm much more aware now of what's happening and what's going on in the game. I've become a lot more aware of the issue because of Sam. As a coach, I never questioned if my players were doing anything illegal but there's always the worry there. Especially with these amateur players- these guys don't get paid, they're working all day and then they come training at night."

The solution, Chalmers believes, is two-fold. Prevention is better than cure, so they say, and this applies to anti-doping as well. Chalmers believes that players need to be better educated and informed about the issues around doping. "Clubs are good with having lists of banned substances but players don't read it," he says. "Unless you're in the [senior] national squad, then you get talks about different substances but Sam had never had any of these talks about what you can and can't take. It wasn't really spoken about because you just don't expect it to happen but everyone has to become more aware. The clubs, especially in the top league, need to be more aware."

In addition to enhancing the education and information provided to the players, Chalmers believes that the testing programme must also be improved. "A lot of the guys who are taking these drugs are playing for clubs in the lower leagues and they're never going to get tested," he says. "It's a huge problem, not just in Scotland but all over the UK and overseas too. I do believe that it is a problem in the sport and more needs to be done with testing."