House Expands Steroid Inquiry

Capitalizing on their success in drawing attention to the abuse of steroids in professional baseball, congressional investigators expanded their drug inquiry Thursday to other major sports, including football, hockey, soccer, track and field, and college athletics.

The House Committee on Government Reform sent a letter to NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, demanding copies of pro football’s drug-testing policy and summary results of players’ tests. The committee gave the NFL until April 8 to comply.

Timing of the letter was spurred in part by a televised report Wednesday on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which included new allegations of steroid use in professional football, committee staff said.

The letter to the NFL was the first of six the committee plans to send, according to committee staffers. Similar letters will be sent to the NBA, the NHL, the NCAA, USA Track and Field, and Major League Soccer.

Committee staff members said more hearings were likely but that there were no definite plans to call league officials or players to testify.

“As the committee has stated publicly numerous times, its focus on the issue of performance-enhancing drug use in sports is not limited to professional baseball,” committee Chairman Rep. Thomas M. Davis (R-Va.) and ranking Democrat Rep. Henry A. Waxman of Los Angeles wrote in the letter.

Tagliabue responded within hours, saying he had directed NFL staff “to be fully responsive to the committee’s request.”

Last month, the committee’s hearing on steroid use in baseball drew gavel-to-gavel television coverage, largely because of the presence of five current or former players, including Mark McGwire and Curt Schilling, who were pointedly questioned about whether they had ever used illegal drugs.

The committee’s plans to look into steroid abuse in professional football was accelerated by the “60 Minutes” report, in which a North Carolina doctor was accused of providing performance-enhancing drugs to some Carolina Panthers during the 2003-04 NFL season. The Panthers played in the Super Bowl that season, losing to the New England Patriots.

At present, the committee is requesting only summary results of NFL drug testing, not individual players’ results.

Committee members have said they want to discourage use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs by younger players.

“We think the abuse of performance-enhancing drugs has become a national health crisis,” said Robert White, a spokesman for the committee’s Republican staff.

“It begins at the top, at the professional level, but it trickles down to the college level and the high school level.”

Committee staff said that the NFL had been more responsive than baseball, which stonewalled requests for information, forcing the committee to issue subpoenas and threaten prosecution of officials and players for contempt of Congress.

“The reason the committee started with baseball is because baseball was taking such an aggressive position, that they weren’t going to investigate,” Phil Schiliro, director of the committee’s Democratic staff, said. “The NFL as a league has tried to deal with the steroids problem. They’ve had a policy on the books for 15 years. The question for the committee is whether that policy is effective.”

The NFL, probably anticipating congressional scrutiny, announced this week it planned to be more thorough when it came to measuring the testosterone levels in players. The intention is to stay in line with Olympic standards, which recently have gotten tougher.

An NFL spokesman said the new stringency was unrelated to the “60 Minutes” report, which said that Dr. James Shortt, now under investigation by federal authorities, had written steroid prescriptions for Panther players Todd Sauerbrun and Jeff Mitchell, and former Panther Todd Steussie.

The CBS report said the three Carolina players had prescriptions for testosterone cream filled during the 2003 season and within two weeks of playing in the Super Bowl. The cream is banned by the NFL.

The report also said that Sauerbrun, among the league’s best punters, obtained syringes and the injectable steroid Stanozolol from the doctor.

Last week, at the annual NFL meetings, New Orleans Saint Coach Jim Haslett, a former pro linebacker, said steroid use was “rampant” in the NFL in the 1970s and early ‘80s -- before the current policy was put in place -- estimating that half the players in the league used them.

The NFL began testing for banned substances in 1987, although those tests were for information only. The league began suspending players for steroid use in 1989, and a year later introduced random testing. In 1993, the policy was written into the collective-bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Assn. According to the NFL, there have been 44 steroid-related suspensions in the league since 1990.

“I’m comfortable our steroid policy is very effective,” Tagliabue said at the meetings. “And, no, I can’t say I’m comfortable with things not slipping through the cracks, because THG [human growth hormone] slipped through everyone’s cracks because it was not a known substance and there was no test for it. And now that there’s a test for it, we’re testing.

“I think we have a very strong program and very pervasive testing and very severe penalties and minimum number of violations. But is it perfect? No.”

Associated Press contributed to this report.