Schooling NFL players in steroid testing loopholes, Texas bodybuilder Dave Jacobs gets probation

David Jacobs, the Texas bodybuilder who cavorted with ex-Cowboy Matt Lehr, says he taught NFL players the steroid testing loopholes.  The purveyor of a 1000 bottles of steroids and a 100 bottles of HGH per month, schooled the players on how to beat the testing, even to the point of coercing NFL players to ask for the masking agent finasteride, prescribed for baldness. For his efforts, Jacobs received probation in a Texas Court this week. Story in the New York Times:

For more than a year, Jacobs operated a makeshift pharmaceutical lab out of his kitchen in his one-story suburban home. Each month, he said, he sold about a thousand of his own bottles of steroids and another thousand kits of human growth hormone smuggled from China to dealers across the United States. Among the dealers he supplied were two N.F.L. players, Jacobs said, who would then supply a handful of other N.F.L. players with the banned substances...

Jacobs, a former body builder, said he advised about 10 N.F.L. players on how to exploit loopholes in the league’s drug-testing program. One way, he said, was to have team doctors write them prescriptions for drugs that would mask steroid use.

Jacobs certainly involved ex-Cowboy Matt Lehr in the drug scheme.  However the details are disputed:

The New York Times reported last month that information from the government’s investigation of Jacobs had led federal prosecutors to investigate Matt Lehr, an offensive lineman for the New Orleans Saints, on the suspicion he distributed performance-enhancing drugs. In recent years, investigators have focused largely on the distributors of drugs, not athletes or other users.

Lehr’s lawyer has denied that his client ever sold steroids or H.G.H. and said Jacobs fabricated information about Lehr after he refused to pay Jacobs’s legal fees. Jacobs said he never asked Lehr to give him money for legal expenses.

In interviews here last week, Jacobs said he sold hundreds of bottles of steroids and H.G.H. to Lehr and another N.F.L. player. Those players, Jacobs said, sold the substances to other players in 2006 and 2007.

“I thought the fewer the people I was selling to, the safer it would be,” Jacobs said. “There were many players who wanted drugs, but I didn’t want to have direct transactions with a bunch of people.”

Lehr tested positive and was suspended for four games in 2006 for testing positive for steroids, but he has not been charged in this case.

The NFL has squeezed by steroid scandals,  however isn't about time to call for an 'NFL Mitchell Report'?

(more after the jump, including Jacob's advice to players)

The details become sordid, conniving NFL doctors to prescribe masking agents; pretty ironic.

Jacobs said he advised players, including Lehr, to ask their team doctors to write them prescriptions for finasteride, a drug used to treat balding in young men. Jacobs said a Falcons team doctor wrote Lehr a prescription for the substance. He said a bottle of finasteride labeled as prescribed for Lehr was seized from his own house in April 2007.

“The excuse they did it under was that the players were losing their hair because they were taking their helmets on and off,” Jacobs said, echoing similar statements that were published Sunday in The Dallas Morning News.

The N.F.L. does not test for the substance, and it is not on its list of banned substances.

“We do not comment on any medical procedures or information about any of our players,” Reggie Roberts, a spokesman for the Falcons, said in a telephone interview.

Greg Aiello, a spokesman for the N.F.L., said the league’s independent scientific and medical advisers reviewed finasteride before and after it was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2005, but recommended that it not be banned.

Don Catlin, the head of the independent organization Anti-Doping Research, said in a telephone interview that finasteride could mask the use of some substances normally detected through urine testing.

Jacobs, who said he stopped using steroids in April 2007, said he also advised players to use steroids only in the off-season.

“The players know the testing is tougher in-season, so they use human growth hormone year round and only use steroids in the off-season,” he said.

The N.F.L. tests its players year round for steroids but does not test players for H.G.H. Of the 12,000 tests the league performs, 4,000 are in the off-season.

Jacobs said he suggested that players say they were out of town or on vacation with their wives when they received phone calls about pending drug tests.

He also said he would then provide the player with an herbal supplement intended to cleanse the system of steroids without being detected.

“A week later, they would be tested and they would pass,” Jacobs said.

The 'good news' is that Jacobs plans on informing the NFL of the loopholes in their testing program -- loopholes large enough to drive a  huge doped lineman through.