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The NFL Has A Painkiller Crisis That It Never Wants To Go Away


Muda69

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https://deadspin.com/the-nfl-has-a-painkiller-crisis-that-it-never-wants-to-1838065948

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Opioids are, technically, banned by the NFL, which makes for a tricky policy given that players are prescribed those same drugs, often by team doctors, to treat various injuries. To my knowledge, no NFL player has ever been suspended for flunking an opioids test. The underlying offenses for such suspensions are technically supposed to remain confidential, though of course when a player tests positive for weed, the details magically end up on Adam Schefter’s Twitter feed before the player has even flushed the toilet.

In order to trigger the NFL’s red flag, the current drug policy states that players have to have more than 300 ng/ml of opioids in their system during testing. This is much lower than the testing limit for other workplaces. But even at the NFL’s limit, a large player would have to take approximately seven Percocet pills (a 5mg dose) to get himself suspended. That number of pills can do down if you’re a smaller player, like a kicker. But, and this is important, the number can go higher if you’re an even bigger and if you’re not using opioids for the first time. No one in the NFL who takes opioids is doing it for the first time.

(Fentanyl is not specifically named in the rule book. When I asked the NFL if it counted in their opioid testing, I never heard back.)

There has been no talk of NFL owners getting together with players to implement stricter testing as a way of ensuring that no one accidentally overdoses. This is because NFL owners wouldn’t go bowling with the player’s union unless they got extra revenue percentages out of the evening. But, more important, it’s because the NFL runs on painkillers. I asked former NFL player and Deadspin contributor Nate Jackson how opiates manage to thrive in the league despite the restrictor plates the league has seemingly placed on them.

“It seems ineffective to test and suspend guys for the same pills that the trainers give them,” Jackson told me. “Too many fuzzy margins with how to enforce that. If you have been injured at all, gotten a prescription, maybe you have pills left over from the last bottle that the trainer got you and it’s been sitting in your bathroom. You play a game, and FUCK, that hurts, so you eat the pills. Also there are rogue trainers slipping guys extra pills and rogue doctors writing prescriptions for players. This happens with Adderall, Xanax, and Ambien as well. Guys get popped from pissing Adderall when their prescription says Ritalin. For these reasons, and because of the visceral immediacy of the moment; the need, the urge, the pain they’re in, I don’t think the policy you explained restricts a player’s use.”

Jackson said he cannot ever recall a teammate getting suspended for these drugs, though he was (or at least, was supposed to be) kept in the dark about the nature such offenses the same way you and I always have been.

Football is a game of pain, and so painkillers are a necessary lubricant to keep it operational. Painkillers are magic. They are glorified by the sport nearly as much as the violence is. That makes addiction an inevitable side effect of feeding the beast. Brett Favre is a recovering painkiller addict who once said he would pop 15 Vicodin pills at a time. Vicodin, née hydrocodone, is an opioid (a partially synthetic one), and you don’t have to dig very far down to unearth more of them across the league. Former linebacker Scott Fujita told the Washington Post that a team doctor once gave him a bottle of Percocet that was the size of a Coke can. Former fullback Charles Evans was regularly handed an unmarked envelope full of Percocet by the Ravens to take for his pain. Evans remained addicted to painkillers after his retirement and died of heart failure at the age of 41. His widow, Etopia, was one of 1,800 plaintiffs who filed a class action lawsuit against the league, separate from the now-renowned concussion suit, demanding recompense for the league from pushing these drugs on players. In April, a federal judge dismissed that class action, leaving the NFL legally blameless for the countless addicts it left at a farm upstate.

Ryan Leaf, himself an outspoken recovering addict, also got hooked on opioids after taking it recreationally in 2002, very shortly after his retirement, to ease the sting after he got booed at a fight in Vegas. He would remain an addict for eight more years. One time, he ran out of pills and grew so despondent that he cut his wrists. When that didn’t kill him, he was about to attempt sitting in a running a car in a closed garage when he his brother managed to stop him.

Leaf was hardly alone in his suffering. While the NFL has a history of flagrantly handing out these drugs to active players, consequences be damned, the retired players it leaves behind also get hooked on opioids to help soothe the football-induced chronic pains that will hound them to the grave. This is how the system works: you get paid to play football. If you’re hurt, you get pressured into playing hurt. If you’re playing hurt, you get your pills to help dull the pain, at least right up until you take your pads off. You find out the pills work and then you keep taking them, even after your career ends. After that, the league gives half a shit. There’s no opioid protocol for NFL players. This is one safety issue that they’d prefer not become a whole THING.

I, like a lot of other people, am now conditioned to wince every time I see a brutal head shot in the course of play. THAT is the football damage I have been told, rightly, to be scared of. But that damage is often paired with a form of treatment that can be equally catastrophic, more insidious, and long-lasting on its own. A lot of people are afraid of a football player dying on the field one day in the near future, but those people could be mistaken as to what the cause of that death might be. Over half of NFL players have taken opioids. You do not watch players take these pills, the way you watch them take brain-jarring hits. The seeds of their addiction are sown in the relative privacy of the locker room, or in the little pop-up medical tent, or somewhere else far from judging eyes. The NFL has no problem with that. As with the concussion crisis, the NFL is presiding over a lethal epidemic that they would prefer you not notice.

You should notice. You should notice the line connecting Tyler Skaggs’s death and the death of people like Charles Evans. You should notice that NFL vets only get five years of healthcare after retirement before being left to fend for themselves. You should notice that the football culture lionizes men who play while crippled while getting them hooked on the same drugs that ALLOW them to play while crippled. How many times have you heard a sideline reporter come bearing great news that a seemingly injured player is okay to come back, thanks to “treatment”? You should notice that the Purdue Pharmaceuticals is hardly the only multi-billion dollar corporation that either directly or indirectly benefits from people taking these drugs. You should notice the NFL not giving retired players free, quality rehab any time they’re in desperate need of it.

And you should definitely notice when the NFL decides to address the problem, if they ever do at all, by making October Opioids Awareness Month and having players wear orange cleats or something. You should notice that they haven’t explored real ways of ridding the sports of these drugs, either through other avenues of pain management (not playing football, of course, would be the optimal solution… but I doubt that’d be on the table), more rigid enforcement of their current opioids policy, and cracking down on those rogue(?) trainers and doctors who overprescribe such medications. You should notice that the NFL will never do any of these things because it doesn’t want to. More critically, it simply can’t. Painkillers are in the fabric of the game as much as the forward pass is.

You should notice all this. Because if you just celebrate players gutting out injuries thanks to both raw determination and mother’s little helper, you’re letting the NFL continue to leech off a devastating national crisis that has had its own significant role in propping up an entire sport. There are more side effects than just what you read on the label.

Yep, the NFL runs on opioids. 

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