Bias in NFL Testing for Drugs Claimed : Football: Three white quarterbacks were protected while league zeroed in black players, TV station reports.

Three white NFL quarterbacks allegedly tested positive for cocaine use over the past 10 years without undergoing mandatory counseling or treatment, while drug tests were used to target black players in the league, a television station reported Wednesday.

The station, ABC affiliate WJLA-TV, in a copyrighted report on NFL drug testing, quoted a former associate of the man hired to lead the NFL’s drug-testing program as saying the league’s drug policy is biased against black athletes.

The station reported that the three quarterbacks are “stars.”

The report came four days before the kickoff of Super Bowl XXIV in New Orleans and two days before the first “state of the league” news conference for recently hired NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

Tagliabue called the report “a smear of all quarterbacks” and “quite absurd.” The story was tainted because it came from a disgruntled employee, he said.

“I think the league, including Commissioner Rozelle (predecessor Pete Rozelle), was careful to apply the program with an even hand,” Tagliabue said in an interview on CBS’s “This Morning.”

Much of the report was based on remarks from Gordon Griffith, formerly employed by Dr. Forest Tennant, a California physician hired by Rozelle in 1986 to head the league’s drug program. Griffith was dismissed in what was described by the station as a payroll dispute.

Griffith told WJLA that Tennant was protecting high-visibility white players while targeting some black athletes.

“I became very discouraged in terms of knowing how unethical some individuals can be in terms of injuring other people’s lives when it comes to drug testing,” Griffith told the television station.

Tennant denied charges he helped protect some players.

The station said either unnamed agents or the quarterbacks themselves confirmed that the three quarterbacks had tested positive for cocaine use. One of the informants told the station the NFL “forgot about it.”

Twenty-five of the 28 quarterbacks who finished the regular season as starters are white. Griffith was asked during the report whether he thinks there was a, “witch hunt,” in the NFL against black players. He replied: “I definitely think there was.”