West Coast star Josh Kennedy has conceded that the Eagles playing group have lost some trust in teammate Willie Rioli following his latest drug incident, but the 33-year-old still hopes to play with the forward before his career ends.

The 25-year-old was due to rejoin Eagles training on June 20 following a two-year ban for drug test tampering and a positive test for cannabis, but another incident at the end of last month in Darwin alters his AFL return.

Rioli escaped conviction in the Northern Territory, pleading guilty to drug possession after being intercepted with 25 grams of cannabis on board a chartered flight, the club are currently deciding his playing future.

While Kennedy is conscious of the need to support his fellow forward, but is also aware of the work needed to be done with the playing group if Rioli plays with West Coast again.

“You do lose a little bit of trust from the group because everyone goes, what are you doing?,” Kennedy told 6PR.

“But It’s how you react to it and how you respond and you know you learn from it and you build that back. Like I said Willie’s got a few things he needs to learn from and hopefully he gets back bigger and better.”

The fallout of Rioli’s latest drug indiscretion has seen comparisons with West Coast’s tumultuous era in the mid 2000s, that included multiple drug fuelled incidents with high profile players.

Kennedy has played 14 seasons at West Coast since 2008 and believed the correlation between the two periods wasn’t fair.

“Yeah it does because the media loves to just bring that back up and we’ve done a fair bit in terms of the club and the playing group going through that culture change,” Kennedy said.

“We’ve been able to put a lot of things in place to move past that but with all these things the media love bringing up past history and they love slamming whenever they can, so it’s something as a playing group we have to deal with but we’re confident our playing group has the right culture.”