The IOC, which has been struggling for the last few years to get all major sports to agree common rules on punishing drug cheats, announced that it would stage the conference in Switzerland next January.
This year's Tour de France - one of the world's most prestigious sport's events - has been completely overshadowed by doping scandals.
At the weekend IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch caused a stir when he suggested the legalisation of some performance-enhancing drugs.
Nearly 10 years on from the positive test of Canadian sprinter Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Olympics rocked world sport, it is clear that some competitors are still using banned performance-enhancing substances to cheat their way to glory.
"The problem of doping is a problem which affects the whole of the sports movement and which now needs to be resolved quickly and effectively after years of indecision and ineffectual actions," international athletics boss Primo Nebiolo said on Monday.
"We are at a crossroads now and we cannot afford to take the wrong route."
The IOC and Nebiolo, head of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) and the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF), have been trying to get all sports to agree to common rules - with limited success.
The IAAF chief had some harsh words for cycling, saying the sport was one of the disciplines which refused to accept ASOIF plans for common doping rules and sanctions five years ago.
"Among the federations which did not accept were cycling, volleyball and tennis but they promised to satisfy those requirements within two years," he said in a statement from the IAAF's headquarters in Monaco.
"The IOC threatened to exclude them from the Olympic Games if this obligation was not respected but we accepted their word that they would step into line."
Nebiolo said the sports were allowed to compete at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics despite the problem.
But he added: "The excuse of their administrators was that in certain circumstances these major changes would do more harm than good and that too much severity would have resulted in damaging unpopularity.
"Recent events in cycling show the results of this sort of reasoning. A sport riddled with the suspicion of doping is bad for everyone and some disciplines are bringing up their athletes with a credo that doping is part of sport."
With athletes more and more prepared to fight drug bans in the civil courts, the IOC is eager to find a clear definition for doping at the conference in Lausanne.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo on Sunday, Samaranch said he believed it was not drug-taking to take a substance which was performance-enhancing but did not damage the health of an athlete.
But Britain's athletics boss Dave Moorcroft slammed the suggestion.
"As soon as we give in to the notion that anything goes then the concept of fair competition has no meaning."
Reuters
International sports chiefs are to attend a world conference on drug abuse after recent controversies have shown that doping is still a huge problem nearly a decade after the Ben Johnson scandal.
