Lawyers for retirees suing the NFL over painkiller use have subpoenaed pharmacy giant CVS Pharmacy for allegedly, according to the retirees, supplying the Miami Dolphins with controlled substances with faulty prescriptions.
The legal briefs filed by the retirees’ counsel do not say when the alleged activity occurred. According to the filings, on at least one occasion CVS prescribed painkillers in the name of a Dolphins trainer that were consumed by a player.
The disclosure, made in a wide-ranging discovery motion filed late last month, appears to be the first time this allegation has publicly been leveled against the Dolphins.
The allegation is, however, similar to one made against the San Diego Chargers in 2010. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly found then-team doctor David Chao wrote more than 100 prescriptions listing himself as the patient. The DEA closed that case in 2012, with a lawyer for Chao quoted at the time describing the situation as a clerical error.
The Dolphins declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
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Retired players Jim McMahon (above) and Richard Dent are among the named plaintiffs in the Dent v. NFL case.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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“Plaintiffs subpoenaed … CVS Pharmacy, which allegedly supplied the Miami Dolphins with controlled substances in the name of the team trainer(s) as the ‘patient(s)’ and engaged in other legally proscribed conduct with the Dolphins,” attorney William Sinclair wrote in a declaration that accompanied the Oct. 24 motion.
Sinclair is a partner with Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin, White LLC, the firm representing the retirees who are suing the NFL, contending that the painkillers the players received ultimately caused them significant health damage. The case, Dent v. NFL, was filed in May and includes nine named plaintiffs, including Richard Dent and Jim McMahon, but the plaintiffs are seeking class-action status.
Asked via email to elaborate on the CVS/Dolphins charge, Sinclair’s partner Steve Silverman responded via email instead, and he declined to comment.
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DENT
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A spokesman for CVS wrote in an email, “While we did receive a subpoena and it is being reviewed, we are not a party in this lawsuit and we have no information about the basis of the allegation contained [in] the motion.”
Between 2010 and 2012, the DEA investigated the Chargers for how the club reported prescription drugs. The pharmaceutical supplier of the team, RSF Pharmaceuticals, surrendered its federal registration as a result of the investigation, according to published reports.
The DEA investigation included RSF and a related firm, SportPharm. In the declaration filed last week, Sinclair disclosed the retirees were also subpoenaing these two firms, in addition to Champion Health, which now owns SportPharm. Champion did not reply for comment.
The NFL and Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin and White are engaged in a dispute over how much information the league and its clubs must make available. The law firm subpoenaed each of the league’s 32 teams Sept. 8 and requested all medical drug information for every player dating to 1968.
The league is resisting those efforts.
“Your requests are overly broad and unduly burdensome in scope, in timeframe, in their duplicative nature vis-à-vis one another, and on the document requests that you have served on the NFL, which unlike the Clubs is a party to this action, and in the burden that they seek to impose on the clubs during the NFL season,” league outside counsel Benjamin Block wrote Sinclair in an email on Oct. 10. The email was included in exhibits attached to the court filings.
Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin and White also has subpoenaed the NFL Physicians Society, an association of team medical professionals. The law firm requested a status conference on the discovery process but was turned down, at least temporarily, last week by the federal court judge overseeing the case.
The retirees have until March to present their case for class certification, and the information gleaned from discovery is critical to that process.
The NFL has asked the court to dismiss the case, doing so in part on the grounds it is pre-empted by labor law, which requires that disputes are handled under the dispute mechanisms outlined in the league’s collective-bargaining agreements. It is the same argument the NFL made in defense of a class-action lawsuit on head trauma before agreeing last year to settle that case. That case never reached the discovery stage.
