Read this last night...Wow.
Men's Journal - The NFL's Secret Drug Problem
It's a long article. A key sample:
But for decades, the sport's most transparent scandal has gone untold, if not unseen. Since the advent, in the 1980s, of modern narcotics like Vicodin and Percocet, and then later OxyContin, team doctors and trainers have dispensed pills in the millions to keep hurt players practicing and playing. That fact has long been an open secret among writers who cover the game, an unspoken pact between league and press to protect what's left of the sport's mythos. In the wake, however, of the concussion pandemic and the cluster of ex-player suicides, the football media has begun to stir. Articles have appeared in regional papers (the New York Daily News, the Minneapolis Star Tribune) that delve, for the first time, into opioid abuse, though only on the part of the players, not the teams that fed them the drugs. Last year, ESPN filed a report on the plight of ex-players with toxic narcotics habits, releasing the results of a survey of pain-pill abuse it had commissioned with a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The survey found that more than half the league's veterans had taken narcotics during their playing days; that almost three-quarters of that cohort had misused the drugs, taking them longer, and in greater amounts, than suggested; that the majority (63 percent) received their drugs from a nonmedical source like a trainer instead of the team doctor; and that a third were using them habitually in retirement. Given the population of 18,000 current NFL retirees, that means at least 3,000 are taking narcotics, and at least 1,500 suffer from pain-pill dependence that compounds their chronic conditions. "They addict these guys to drugs to keep a product on the field, then cut them when they're too hurt to play," says Mel Owens, a former outside linebacker with the Los Angeles Rams who's now a disability lawyer in Southern California with hundreds of ex-players as clients. "The guys file for workmen's comp, and the teams say, 'Why should we pay you? You're nothing but lowlife addicts!' It's the next big front in our battle with the league: a class-action suit for drug malpractice."
To summarize, the NFL has a PED problem, a head injury problem and also a painkiller addiction problem.
The story about former QB Ray Lucas is brutal.
