Former NFL wide receiver J.D. Hill’s life went straight to hell after he left the league in 1979, addicted to the painkillers that kept him in the game for seven seasons with the Buffalo Bills and the Detroit Lions.
Hill no longer had access to the NFL doctors and trainers who gave him piles of pills during his career. He turned to street drugs to deal with his football-related pain, eventually became homeless, and spent the next 20-plus years bouncing in and out of treatment centers.
Hill, former Chicago Bears quarterback Jim McMahon and six other former NFL players claim the league illegally gave them narcotics and other painkillers that led to addiction and long-term medical complications in an explosive class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday in San Francisco federal court.
The suit says the league obtained and administered painkillers, anti-inflammatories and sleep medication without prescriptions in order to get injured players back on the field as quickly as possible without regard to the athletes’ long-term health. Players were not informed of the drugs’ side effects, the dangers of taking medication beyond the recommended dosages or mixing it with alcohol, or the potential for addiction, the lawsuit says.
“Rather than allowing players the opportunity to rest and heal, the NFL has illegally and unethically substituted pain medications for proper health care to keep the NFL’s tsunami of dollars flowing,” the lawsuit says of the $9 billion-a-year league.
More than 500 other NFL retirees have also joined the lawsuit, which shines a light on what players’ attorney Phil Closius describes as a pervasive culture of painkiller abuse and addiction that went well beyond the league’s teams, doctors and trainers.
“We’re confident this was a league-wide, league-supplied drug culture,” Closius told the Daily News.
An NFL spokesman said the league had not seen the lawsuit and its attorneys have not had an opportunity to review it.
“As a player, you get all of these drugs for free over the years of your career. Then suddenly you are released and the free supply stops overnight,” says Hill, who has overcome his addiction and now works as a pastor and substance-abuse counselor. “Many players are addicted and turn to street dealers for the drugs formerly provided by the NFL. This then leads to other problems such as cocaine or heroin use, bankruptcy and prison.”
The suit claims that NFL teams were well aware that they were violating drug laws. The suit says trainer Fred Caito came down hard on offensive lineman Keith Van Horne, McMahon’s teammate on the 1985 Super Bowl champion Bears, after a doctor without any affiliation to the NFL prescribed Percodan.
“The problem was that the Bears ordered painkillers in advance of every season under a player’s name and Van Horne had thus put Caito in a bad spot by obtaining the Percodan when there were already DEA records that hundreds of painkillers had been ordered in Van Horne’s name, even though Van Horne had no need for the medications the Bears had ordered at the time the order was placed,” the suit says.
McMahon, meanwhile, became addicted to painkillers, downing more than 100 Percocet pills per month, the lawsuit says. Team doctors and trainers didn’t get prescriptions for the medication, keep records or explain side effects.
Ex-San Francisco 49ers center Jeremy Newberry, meanwhile, says he suffers from severe kidney failure as a result of the painkillers and anti-inflammatories he received from team doctors and trainers. He can no longer take medication for his “violent” headaches, the suit says, because it might cause further kidney problems.
Drug addiction has not received as much attention as the long-term consequences of traumatic brain injuries for football players, but Dr. William Focazio, the founder of Pain Alternatives, Solutions and Treatment, says the vast majority of the hundreds of ex-players he has worked with have struggled with painkillers.
“Every player I get has told me they were given white envelopes with pills and told, ‘This one is for pain; this one is for sleep,’ says Focazio, whose organization provides care to destitute NFL players. “Many of them have severe addiction problems.
“Pain tells us when it is time to rest and recover, and when you mask it, you exacerbate injuries,” Focazio adds. “The injuries we treat are much worse than they should have been because the league let these guys play when they should have been resting.”
The league agreed to pay $765 million last year to players who claimed in a lawsuit that the NFL concealed the dangers of concussions, but a federal judge rejected the deal in January and the case is still pending.
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