It appears that the federal government is mounting a case against Applied Pharmacy Services (APS) based in Mobile, Alabama. APS has been target of a federal probe for several years although no one has yet been charged with a crime.
However, in court documents provided to MESO-Rx indicate federal investigators believe APS was part of a conspiracy to distribute anabolic steroids:
[A]n illegal conspiracy to dispense and distribute anabolic steroids, which are Schedule III controlled substances, human growth hormone (HGH) and other drugs, outside the usual course of professional medical practice.
The alleged conspiracy includes Applied Pharmacy Services, Inc. with Samuel Kelley and Jason Kelley identified as major shareholders involved in the day-to-day operations of the pharmacy.
Also named in the conspiracy is Brett Branch, an APS sales rep and owner of Infinite Health in Eaton, Colorado. Brett Branch is accused of recruiting local physicians to write steroid prescriptions for customers of his clinic as well as recruiting customers from gyms around Eaton, Colorado; Branch also allegedly received commissions on each steroid prescription dispensed to customers of Infinite Health. Colorado physicians identified include Kenneth Olds, M.D., Kelly Tucker, M.D. and Scott Corliss, M.D. Dr. Tucker subsequently invested in Infinite Health to become a co-owner with Branch.
A raid on APS in December 2006 originated with Albany District Attorney David Soares. However, the federal investigation and alleged conspiracy charges are separate from the New York state investigation.
Sylvester Stallone is interviewed in Time Magazine as part of his media tour to promote his latest Rambo movie. He continues to defend his use of growth hormone and explains that it is not an anabolic steroid.
HGH [human growth hormone] is nothing. Anyone who calls it a steroid is grossly misinformed.
Testosterone to me is so important for a sense of well-being when you get older. Everyone over 40 years old would be wise to investigate it because it increases the quality of your life. Mark my words. In 10 years, it will be over the counter.
Sylvester Stallone appeared on the Today Show with Matt Lauer last Friday to promote his new movie, Rambo. Matt Lauer asked Stallone if he used growth hormone to “pump up”. Stallone proceeded to explain that growth hormone was in a completely different category of drugs than anabolic steroids. This is self-apparent to most readers of the MESO-Rx website, but most mainstream news organizations and commentators still think that growth hormone is an anabolic steroid. Stallone proceed to tell Matt Lauer about the therapeutic benefits of growth hormone for athletes and non-athletes.
The most important thing about hGH [human growth hormone] is that it enhances.. A lot of people should really be aware of… is that it takes off the wear and tear that, especially if you’re an athlete, the amount of beating your body takes. The power to recuperate is very, very limited. So, all it does is expedit [recovery]. People think that it changes… If that were the case, everyone would be a superhuman being.
The last steroid confrontation to face Sylvester Stallone were accussations by Janice Dickinson that he injected her with steroids while they were engaged.
Radley Balko - senior editor and investigative journalist for Reason magazine,
Norman Fost, M.D., M.P.H. - professor of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, and director of the Bioethics Program which he founded in 1973;
Julian Savulescu - Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and of the Program on Ethics and Biosciences in the James Martin 21st Century School.
I highly recommend that you download and read the transcript of the entire debate. Here are some excerpts with compelling arguments from Norm Fost why we should change the “rules of the game” to permit anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances:
1. Steroids Give an Unfair Advantage to Athletes
…advantages are only unfair if they’re unequally distributed. The usual solution is to expand access. When Bob Seagren showed up at the ’72 Olympics in-, with a fiberglass pole, it was not banned, but, a-, uh, there was a time to allow others to practice with it, and it was incorporated. When Kenyan runners were found to enhance their performance by raising their hemoglobin by training at altitude, the reaction was not to ban abnormally high hemoglobins, or to prohibit others from training at altitude, but to encourage everyone to do it.
2. Steroids are Harmful to Athletes
Two, critics say these drugs are harmful, but they rely on information that’s wiley-, wildly exaggerated or just fabricated. We are told repeatedly that these drugs use heart disease, cancer, and stroke, while human growth hormone has been given to almost a million children for fifty years, and there’s still no real serious side effects that have been discovered… I ask you in the audience to quickly name, in your own minds, a single elite athlete who’s had a stroke or a heart attack while playing sports… But sport itself is far more dangerous, and we don’t prohibit it. The number of deaths from playing professional football and college football are fifty to a hundred times higher than even the wild exaggerations about steroids. More people have died playing baseball than have died of steroid use.
3. Athletes are Coerced into Using Steroids
Three critics say that allowing their use is coercive, that you’re forced to use them… Coercion is the use or threat of force that’s never occurred in this country to the best of my knowledge. There is no entitlement to play professional sports; it’s a privilege requiring an enormous sacrifice and taking on enormous risks, with or without steroids. Many walk away from it and choose not to do it, and no one is forced to take it on.
4. Steroids Undermine Fan Interest
Four, critics claim that steroids undermine fan interest, and this is simply empirically false, baseball attendance has ridden steadily in the steroid era, professional football is even more popular, and Barry Bonds, widely assumed to be a steroid user, is the biggest draw in sports, adding ten thousand fannies in the seats everywhere he goes. Chicks love the long ball, guys love the long ball, they don’t care what they’re using.
5. Steroids Undermine Integrity of Records
This is naïve, the records are not comparable with or without steroids or growth hormone. Baseball fences are shorter, the mound is lower, the ball is livelier, and Coors Field is a mile above sea level. By one estimate, Babe Ruth playing in today’s ball parks would hit a thousand home runs, not the mere seven hundred and fifty that Hank Aaron and Bonds have hit. The only valid comparison is with peers playing in the same arenas with the same equipment against the same opponents, and Ruth hit more home runs in one season than any other team. He is in a league of his own, and no one has come close.
6. Steroid Use by Athletes Bad for Children
Finally, critics claim that steroids present bad role modeling for children - Everyone agrees these drugs should be banned for children. The adverse effects are different, they stunt growth, they are not competent to make informed choices. I support testing in schools, not to punish the kids, but to catch the peddlers. Anyone caught selling drugs to children should be hung, followed by a fair trial. In closing, when you go out to dinner tonight, enjoy the wine that relaxes you, or start your day tomorrow with a double mocha latte that gets you going, but please be less critical of others who, like you, try to enhance their performance in a variety of ways. Thank you.
Model Janice Dickinson, an admitted former cocaine and alcohol addict, said that she regularly witnessed Sylvester Stallone using anabolic steroids. Not only that, but she also claims he gave her steroids too.
I’d wake up and my arm was as big as Popeye - steroids, testosterone, all that stuff.
Of course, all anabolic steroid users know that is how steroids work - you take steroids, go to sleep, and wake up in the morning looking like a muscular bodybuilder!
Sylvester Stallone and Janice Dickinson were engaged at one point in the 1980s until Stallone discovered he was not the father of her child. A spokesperson for Stallone responded to the steroid allegations:
Janice Dickinson lied about the origin of her child and she’s lying about this.
Sly Stallone was fined last year for importing a personal supply of growth hormone into Australia where he was promoting Rocky Balboa. Stallone has been busy promoting his latest movie, Rambo, the fourth installment in the Rambo series.
Roger Clemens attorney should be fired. Obviously, attorney Rusty Hardin must have devised the strategy used by Roger Clemens in his interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes tonight. Brian McNamee’s attorney, Richard Emery, was spot on when he identified the likely legal strategy:
I think that this is a lawyers’ game, which allows him to try and attempt to say that McNamee didn’t know what he was injecting or that at least Clemens didn’t know what he was injecting.
Conceivably, this is a crafty legal strategy to suggest that Clemens received so many injections of substances that were NOT anabolic steroids, testosterone, or growth hormone, that there is a chance that McNamee and/or Clemens simply didn’t know what was injected.
Roger took bunches of his shots over his career, much the way racehorses do, unfortunately.
But from a public relations standpoint, this strategy is stupid. It is stupid for the attorney to make an analogy to a racehorse; it is stupid to have Clemens’ publicly outline the hypocrisy of drug use in major league baseball…
Clemens’ admission to injecting several performance-enhancing substances that were to help joints and/or mask pain pointed out the hypocrisy of selectively demonizing some performance enhancers while condoning others. Drugs that allow a baseball player to “mask pain” are arguably more dangerous than growth hormone use and even steroid use. Yet Clemens is proud to use these drugs to mask pain allowing him to continue playing and performing while injured.
Clemens admitted to regularly using Toradol, which is considerably more liver toxic than most oral anabolic steroids. Yet the dangerous liver toxicity of oral androgens is unacceptable, but the even more dangerous liver toxicity of Toradol (not to mention its use to mask pain to allow players to perform while injured) is perfectly acceptable.
The regular denials by athletes accused of using anabolic steroids and growth hormone has become relatively commonplace and quite boring. So, I didn’t expect much from Mike Wallace’s 60 Minutes interview of baseball player Roger Clemens (who was accused by trainer Brian McNamee of using testosterone and growth hormone in the Mitchell Report). But I was pleasantly surprised when Clemens offered “proof” that he never used steroids or GH. If he did use the alleged performance enhancing drugs…
He would have grown a “third ear out of his head”;
He would have been able to “pull a tractor with his teeth”;
His tendons would have “turned to dust”;
His body would have experienced a “breakdown”; and
He would have lost “flexibility”
Since none of these things happened, that must be proof positive that he never used steroids or growth hormone!!
A Roger Clemens T-shirt with the question “Got Rocket Fuel?” was released about six months ago. But the phrase has taken on new meaning since the release of the Mitchell Report and the allegations of steroid use and growth hormone use were published a couple of weeks ago. The prices have been discounted on sport merchandise with names of athletes accused of steroid use:
On clearance racks of the team’s clubhouse stores and in the sale section of its Web site is a T-shirt that has taken on an unintended connotation since Roger Clemens, known as the Rocket, was linked to the use of steroids and human growth hormone. His name and No. 22 are printed on the back, and the front asks, “Got Rocket Fuel?”
Yet a search for this t-shirt on the internet indicate that it is largely sold out with the exception of a few stores.
Major League Baseball claimed, in the Mitchell Report, that they have not issued “therapeutic use exemptions” (TUE) for growth hormone (GH). The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) describes these medical exemptions as follows:
Athletes, like all others, may have illnesses or conditions that require them to take particular medications. If the medication an athlete is required to take to treat an illness or condition happens to fall under the Prohibited List, a Therapeutic Use Exemption may give that athlete the authorization to take the needed medicine.
An athletes could be permitted to use drugs that have performance-enhancing effects if they have been issued a TUE. A positive result of a doping test would be dismissed as a result of the TUE.
It is good to know that MLB has not issued TUEs for GH; of course, growth hormone is undetectable in current sports drug testing.
However, when the Mitchell Report asked for the total number of therapeutic use exemptions granted, the Commissioner’s Office refused to answer:
I asked for the number of therapeutic use exemptions granted each year for performance enhancing substances (without identifying the players involved) because therapeutic use exemptions have been a significant loophole in some drug testing programs. The Commissioner’s Office and the Players Association declined to provide that information on the ground that it is considered confidential under the joint program.
Is it possible that several players have TUEs to use anabolic steroids without concern about drug testing?
Sixty percent of the 105 riders subject to testing were issued therapuetic use exemptions by the International Cycling Union (UCI):
We follow the WADA rules and the WADA rules allow guys to have (the certificates) for certain things… It’s not particular to cycling.
The number of TUEs issued by Major League Baseball could potentially be a huge loophole in their drug testing procedures especially since their procedures are much more lax than those of WADA (World Anti-Doping Association).
