Report: DEA investigating prescription drug distribution in the NFL

[papasmurfbell]

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/07/13/report-dea-investigating-prescription-drug-distribution-in-the-nfl/

 

NFL locker rooms are reportedly the focus of a federal investigation into abuse of prescription medication.

The New York Daily News reports that the Drug Enforcement Administration has launched an investigation into the abuse of prescription medication in the NFL. Agents are talking to former players about how NFL doctors and trainers treat players with drugs like Percodan, Vicodin and Toradol, all of which players have said they are given by members of their teams’ medical staff.

“They want to find out who provided and distributed the drugs to football players,” one source told the newspaper.

The investigation began after a group of former players sued the NFL, saying they were not warned of possible side effects of taking the prescription medication that team doctors gave out. When that lawsuit was filed, it was easy to assume that the owners could make it go away with a settlement, just as they’ve managed to find a settlement to the concussion litigation that will satisfy most of the plaintiffs without bankrupting the league.

But a DEA investigation is very different, and potentially a much more serious problem for the NFL.

 

 

[vmax]

This is so ridiculous that I'm speechless.

Our Government will spend a ton of money on a incredibly small percentage of the population while a drug abuse epidemic rages all over America in every level of this society. ..all ages...ect.

Of course they take pain killers! By Sunday night every NFL player is experiencing symptoms of being in a car wreck.

Just give them 2 aspirin.

[papasmurfbell]

The question is do they abuse it. The FDA has been going after doctors who write bogus scripts for a while now. Now they are applying the same authority to the NFL.

[vmax]

No, no, no no....

 

There's around 1,700 players...this is way beyond small potatoes as far as what's going on in this country.

 

Go after these operations which are happening everywhere...

 

 

 

The buzz came mostly by word-of-mouth but also from flyers circulated among New Jersey’s homeless Medicaid recipients and drug addicts. It told them where to get pain pills — and fast — prescribed by corrupt doctors who then bilked government health insurance out of millions while operating out of makeshift medical facilities, authorities said.

The doctors, joined by unscrupulous entrepreneurs, were the subject of a two-year report by the State Commission of Investigation released Wednesday that highlights illicit medical practices that it found to be fueling prescription drug and heroin abuse and distribution in the state.

The cases included one operation where a van picked up patients in Newark and took them to a medical center in a strip mall in Passaic. There, a doctor conducted cursory examinations and bogus diagnoses that resulted in prescriptions of painkillers, sedatives and cough syrup, authorities said. The report says the doctors told the patients they could either consume the drugs themselves or sell them on the street and then handed out a $10 gift card as thanks for coming in.

The doctor then billed government health insurance, netting $1.4 million, and funneled the money to associates he was working with who were linked to Russian organized crime, authorities said.

The doctor moved his operation several times around the state — with one facility becoming so overrun with drug addicts that a bouncer was hired to control the crowds, but he was later fired for doing drugs on-site, the report said. In another operation, investigators found a northern New Jersey doctor bilked Medicaid to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars he owed to members of the mafia, authorities said.

The report also describes a chiropractic office operating out of a seemingly abandoned building in Camden that had boarded-up windows and a battered front door in a normally desolate area of the city that it described as suddenly springing to life on Tuesdays.

The reason, the report says, was that Dr. Randy Zeid was in. During a 19-month period, an estimated street value of nearly $10 million of the narcotic drug oxycodone was prescribed.

http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2013/07/12/298309.htm

Edited July 14, 2014 by vmax