The Sixth Man

Pages 278-287

sydney, australia

February 16-19, 2007

Just as Linda Hamilton had redefined body image for women in Terminator 2, Sylvester Stallone was trying to do the same thing for 60-year-old men with Rocky Balboa, the sixth film in his signature franchise. The storyline wasn't going to win any screenwriting awards: Rocky decides to step into the ring after seeing a computer simulation of himself fighting the current champion on ESPN. But that didn't matter. Fans didn't go to Rocky movies for the plot. They went for the same reason they would visit Rome: to see how the ruins were holding up. And, by all accounts, Sly was doing just fine. Writing in The New York Times, Stephen Holden observed: "Mr. Stallone's body is a sight. A weightlifter's slab of aged meat, knotted with tiny hard veins popping out of the shoulders, it is just this side of muscle-bound and somewhat grotesque. It is something you might see hung in the window of a steak house and wonder what kind of carnivore would order such a leathery, sinewy carcass."

Since its release in late December, Rocky Balboa was doing respectable business for MGM. On an international tour that included a red carpet walk in London's Leicester Square, Stallone was receiving enthusiastic receptions. Up ahead was a premiere in Sydney. As he stepped off a Qantas flight, he handed a Customs agent an incoming visitor card that asked whether he was bringing in any "medicines, steroids, firearms, weapons, or any kind of illicit drugs." Stallone circled the word "no."

Unfortunately for him, an alert airport employee discovered that his answer wasn't entirely true. When Stallone's luggage was randomly X-rayed, the machine turned up 48 vials of human growth hormone.

The discovery led Customs officials to escort Stallone to a detention area, where the actor tried to explain why he had filled out the visitor card as he did. After Sydney, he explained, he was heading to Myanmar (formerly Burma) to film his fourth Rambo movie. "Doing Rambo is hard work and I'm going to be in Burma for a while," he told one Customs officer. "Where do you think I am going to get this stuff in Burma?"

Two hours later, Stallone was released and given permission to attend the Australian premiere of his movie at an open-air screen overlooking Sydney Harbor on Saturday. But, he was told, he should expect a visit by Australian Customs officials with a notice for him to appear in court. When reporters got wind of his detention on Sunday, Stallone tried to keep the whole affair low-key. "I do know [why I was stopped] but I can't tell you," he told Sydney's Daily Telegraph. "To [Customs] it's major, but it's really minor stuff. I just made a mistake ... I misunderstood a few things and we are going through the process."

Apparently, Stallone wasn't done misunderstanding the Australian drug laws. When Customs agents arrived at the swank Park Hyatt the next day to deliver the court notice, they noticed something strange by Stallone's hotel window: There was Rocky himself (some reports claim it was members of his entourage), feverishly throwing pills out of the hotel. While one group of agents rushed up to his room, and another was dispatched to search a private jet that Stallone had waiting for him at the airport, a third went to recover the discarded pills. They were later analyzed and found to be testosterone cypionate.

As it happens, Stallone was getting some very good medical advice. A study by Sydney's own Garvan Institute found that HGH taken alone doesn't do much except increase fluid retention. However, when taken in conjunction with testosterone, the study found that HGH had a demonstrable effect in one category: sprinting power. Of course, the authors of the study noted that any athlete using them in tandem stood a greater chance of getting caught since drug tests routinely pick up testosterone.

But actors didn't get tested for drugs, did they?

The question of who advised Stallone was answered when the case eventually came to trial. (He would eventually plead guilty to two counts of importing and possessing prohibited substances.) Although Stallone couldn't produce any prescriptions for the drugs he was carrying, he did submit a note from his doctor, who attested to the fact that he was taking them under medical supervision. The doctor's name was familiar to anyone who had hung around Lyle Alzado at the end of his life-it was Alzado's personal physician, Robert Huizenga.

orlando, florida

February 27, 2007

Eugene Bolton, a former semi-pro football player, slid the envelope across the table to his lunch mate, a beautiful obstetrician with a side practice in anti-aging medicine. Inside the envelope was $1,750-payment for easy work. According to Bolton, all the doctor had done was sign prescription orders for people she had never met and could scarcely even call patients. The meeting had been arranged by a third person at the table, the business manager for Signature, a pharmacy down the street.

Signature belonged to a little-known, but lucrative corner of the pharmaceutical industry called compounding pharmacies. Instead of selling name-brand drugs, compounding pharmacies bought bulk raw materials from around the world and then mixed their own generic drugs. There are hundreds of compounding pharmacies in the United States, but Signature had a special niche. As Bolton knew all too well, it supplied a national network of "wellness centers" that weren't nearly as wholesome as they sounded. The 6-foot-7, 345-pound Bolton called his suburban Houston outfit Cellular Nucleonic Advantage, but the name was just window dressing. He advertised in custom car magazines for people who wanted to get cheap and easy prescriptions, then took orders with his girlfriend over the phone.

Once a customer was on board, Bolton sent his or her prescription request to a friendly doctor who would sign it, often for as little as $25. The last stop on the drug chain was Signature, which would fill the prescription and send it back to the customer.

According to a report prepared for the World Anti-Doping Agency, an estimated $2 billion worth of HGH has been sold worldwide, and places like Signature were a big reason why.

The company imported the raw powder from China through a local businessman. (His main job was, of all things, building stone fountains for mansions, but he went to China frequently enough to have made other connections.) And it was all legal, or at least mostly legal. Unlike steroids, growth hormone wasn't on the federal register of controlled substances; the only way an individual could get in trouble was by not having a prescription.

According to the information Bolton provided to authorities, that's where he came in, and why Signature's business manager was eager to help him. In an effort to help him clear more prescriptions, Bolton claimed the executive suggested he strike up a relationship with Claire Godfrey, the anti-aging doctor who also worked as a medical correspondent for Fox TV. The money he was handing over was for 30 prescription forms that she had signed.^{^[1]}

What Bolton's lunch mates didn't know was that the ex-lineman was wired for sound. Laws about doctor-patient relationships vary from state to state, but New York has one of the toughest: doctors must see a patient before writing a prescription. Agents working for the District Attorney in Albany, New York, had been looking into doctors who were writing e-mail prescriptions without face-to-face meetings when they stumbled on Bolton's operation. Cornering him, they said that he could cooperate in a case against Signature or take his chances going to jail. Bolton cooperated and the transcript of this lunch proved to be exactly what the lawmen needed.

On February 27, they would descend on Signature and arrest Bolton's two lunch mates, along with Signature's owners, a married pair of Orlando pharmacists who had done $36 million worth of business in 2006. (While the principals in the Signature case would plead not guilty, Bolton and his girlfriend both accepted felony charges of filing false prescriptions.)

During the raid, the agents would also cart away box loads of patient records that showed Sylvester Stallone was hardly alone in using HGH. One invoice showed that Signature shipped growth hormone to a New York hotel room that was occupied by a member of a major pop star's touring band. Another reportedly showed that Gary Matthews, a 32-year-old outfielder for the Los Angeles Angels, ordered some as well, from a pharmacy in Alabama. (In a statement issued two weeks after the first report, Matthews insisted, "I have never taken HGH.")

The NFL would also discover that a doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers purchased $150,000 in performance enhancers with his credit card. (Though dropped from the team's roster, the doctor has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has stated that the HGH he ordered is intended for his older patients.)

Beyond that, Arnold Schwarzenegger would be left red-faced on the weekend of the 2007 Arnold Expo when reporters informed him that the man he had just crowned winner of his Arnold Classic, Victor Martinez, had bought steroids from a clinic involved in the case.^{^[2]} The governor's spokesman was left to reply, "Clearly, steroid use is something he is very strongly opposed to." ^{^[3]}

shanghai, china

Spring 2007

Nothing in the pharmaceutical executive's appearance suggested that he was one of China's largest producers of HGH- nothing, that is, except the pained expression that crossed his face when he was asked about the arrest of Sylvester Stallone.

Business had been good lately. His company was among China's fast growing biotech firms and the rows of cubicles outside his office attested to the growing size of his sales staff. Indeed, the executive saw what he was doing as a kind of public service for the people of China.

Other drug companies made growth hormone, but the price was astronomical-in some cases as much as $80 a unit. And it didn't have to be. In 2005, Swiss-based Serono labs and its U.S. subsidiaries paid the third largest healthcare fraud recovery in American history-$704 million-after evidence emerged that it was profiting off a drug approved by the FDA solely to treat AIDS wasting syndrome. Once the demand for the drug abated because of the advent of protease inhibitors, Serono created a fraudulent system for measuring body cell mass that qualified thousands of otherwise unqualified patients. This in turn led to Medicaid reimbursements for six-week treatments costing as much as $21,000 each. In the end, scores of patients wound up selling the HGH that they didn't need to bodybuilders and other athletes, simultaneously padding Serono's profits and fueling the black market.

The Chinese executive portrayed himself as a pharmaceutical patriot, making HGH for as low as a dollar a unit for his country's needy: children with dwarfism, burn victims, people with AIDS. "The American price is too high for the Chinese people," he explained. "We give them hope."

But Stallone's arrest for possession of HGH had brought unwanted attention to his industry. Now the FDA had put certain brands of Chinese HGH on a special watch list so that any shipments directly to the United States could be seized and destroyed.

The executive said he hoped to be seen as reputable by the American government, not as a rogue, which was why he recently stopped selling directly to the U.S. through his Web site. "I want the FDA to know we want to be legal," he said. But then he added that he couldn't control where his products went once they were sold to the hospital supply wholesalers who distributed it around China. "The demand is very great," he allowed.

What concerned him most was the explosion of counterfeit growth hormone, much of it sold under legitimate brand names, including his own. The technology to manufacture HGH is difficult, but once mastered, it can be easily reproduced. "Some of the people making this have worked for me before," he said knowingly. "But what can I do? They could be in India, Pakistan, maybe even Moscow. They can be anywhere."

hanover, new jersey

March 12, 2007

To the police in Hanover, New Jersey, it was about to become clear that China's performance enhancement pipeline didn't stop with wellness clinics and anti-aging doctors. It was also fueling a new breed of underground steroid labs that supplied Main Street America.

That was evident when they decided to pay a visit to Anthony Cuppari, a volunteer assistant coach for the Hornets of Hanover Park High School.

In the fall of 2006, New Jersey became the first state to mandate steroid monitoring, ordering that playoff teams be randomly tested at the start of the new academic year. But the prospect of testing hadn't stopped whispers from circulating about the Hornets. After the team crushed its opening day opponent 42-0, the team's coach, Dan Gregory, told the Morristown Daily Record, "The numbers in the weight room are better than any ever."

Looking at game film before a fall 2006 match-up with the Hornets, the coaches at rival Chatham High could see that was no idle boast. These kids were huge. And so was Cuppari, an ex-Hornets running back who worked as personal trainer at a gym in Florham Park. Because of his size, he was impossible to miss prowling the sideline.

The Chatham coaches couldn't help but be suspicious. But those suspicions might have remained idle if not for one thing: Just before New Jersey was enacting its steroid testing program, Morris County police arrested 54 people in a probe of prescription painkillers sales around Hanover Park High and two other area high schools. During the course of that probe, they learned that steroids were being peddled along with the painkillers.

After a two-month undercover operation, the police obtained search warrants for the home of Cuppari and a friend named Michael Dente. In the first house, they found steroids, GHB, cocaine, and what was later described as "items necessary to the manufacturing process." In the second, they found a fully functional drug lab, complete with a pill press and raw materials from China and elsewhere used to make steroids, Cialis, Viagra, and GHB. Both men were charged with second-degree felony counts involving conspiracy to manufacture the drugs and several counts of drug distribution. (The cases are still pending.)

As the sweep broadened, 16 people were arrested, including a 17-year-old Hornets player who allegedly bought GHB-which can be used to mask steroids. A 35-year-old bodybuilder allegedly loaned his drug-making expertise to the crew.

And just like that, Hanover, New Jersey, was forced to answer the same question that had already been asked in Colleyville, Texas-the same question that was destined to confront more and more communities: Was it time to make steroid testing in schools even stronger?

In Orlando, Florida, a police officer working on the Signature case left little doubt that something had to be done. "We're finding a lot of kids, 15, 16 [ordering steroids]," he told the Palm Beach Post. "It's a simple thing. They get a prepaid credit card at Albertson's, and suddenly they're playing better basketball and their parents don't know why."

Meanwhile, a Florida legislator had proposed a pilot program to test one percent of the state's 59,000 football, basketball, and weightlifting athletes. Around the same time, the lieutenant governor of Texas was pushing a bill to target 22,000 of his state's 733,000 public school students.

In the midst of all this, researchers at the University of Minnesota released a little-noticed report that raised a question about whether all the legislating was heading in the right direction.

Researchers there surveyed 2,516 middle and high school students in 1999, and then followed up again in 2004. What they discovered was that those who were in high school in 1999 were three times less likely to use steroids when they became young adults. In other words, they experimented for a time, got tired of the novelty, and moved on. The survey also noted that most of the use was casual. Among the 1,130 boys who were tracked, only two-or .17 percent-reported using them every day. Slightly more than half of those who used said they did so "a few times in the past year."

What was particularly striking about the survey was that all those who admitted experimenting with steroids weren't using them exclusively for sports. Both boys and girls reported trying steroids because they wanted better bodies, albeit for opposite reasons: The boys felt they were too thin, while the girls felt overweight.

Given that, did it really make sense for school districts to get into contentious and costly biological wars with their students? The lead author of the study, Patricia van den Berg, considered the question: "It depends on society's aim," she said. "If the aim is its making sports clean, then the answer may be yes. But if the aim is to affect adolescent health, it may be wiser to put the same money into seat belt education, since automobile accidents are a leading cause of death among teenagers."

In the end, it all seemed to come down to what Lori Lewis had discovered in Colleyville: The best line of defense is parents who want to know the truth, and coaches who are willing to stand up for it.

^[1] Dr. Godfrey eventually pleaded guilty to criminal diversion of prescription medications and was sentenced to five years' probation.

^[2] Martinez has not been charged and is not named in the indictments. He claimed he was buying testosterone because he had been diagnosed as having low levels by a clinic involved in the larger investigation that had prescribed it. The clinic owners have pleaded not guilty to submitting
prescriptions for steroids without a medical need.

^[3] The headlines didn't end there. Eleven wrestlers, including several WWE superstars, were caught in a parallel investigation of a Mobile, Alabama, company called Applied Pharmacy.

	Steroid Nation

Pages 278-287 sydney, australia February 16-19, 2007 Just as Linda Hamilton had redefined body image for women in Terminator 2, Sylvester Stallone was trying to do the same thing for 60-year-old men with Rocky Balboa, the sixth film in his signature franchise. The storyline wasn't going to win any screenwriting awards: Rocky decides to step into the ring after seeing a computer simulation of himself fighting the current champion on ESPN. But that didn't matter. Fans didn't go to Rocky movies for the plot. They went for the same reason they would visit Rome: to see how the ruins were holding up. And, by all accounts, Sly was doing just fine. Writing in The New York Times, Stephen Holden observed: "Mr. Stallone's body is a sight. A weightlifter's slab of aged meat, knotted with tiny hard veins popping out of the shoulders, it is just this side of muscle-bound and somewhat grotesque. It is something you might see hung in the window of a steak house and wonder what kind of carnivore would order such a leathery, sinewy carcass." Since its release in late December, Rocky Balboa was doing respectable business for MGM. On an international tour that included a red carpet walk in London's Leicester Square, Stallone was receiving enthusiastic receptions. Up ahead was a premiere in Sydney. As he stepped off a Qantas flight, he handed a Customs agent an incoming visitor card that asked whether he was bringing in any "medicines, steroids, firearms, weapons, or any kind of illicit drugs." Stallone circled the word "no." Unfortunately for him, an alert airport employee discovered that his answer wasn't entirely true. When Stallone's luggage was randomly X-rayed, the machine turned up 48 vials of human growth hormone. The discovery led Customs officials to escort Stallone to a detention area, where the actor tried to explain why he had filled out the visitor card as he did. After Sydney, he explained, he was heading to Myanmar (formerly Burma) to film his fourth Rambo movie. "Doing Rambo is hard work and I'm going to be in Burma for a while," he told one Customs officer. "Where do you think I am going to get this stuff in Burma?" Two hours later, Stallone was released and given permission to attend the Australian premiere of his movie at an open-air screen overlooking Sydney Harbor on Saturday. But, he was told, he should expect a visit by Australian Customs officials with a notice for him to appear in court. When reporters got wind of his detention on Sunday, Stallone tried to keep the whole affair low-key. "I do know [why I was stopped] but I can't tell you," he told Sydney's Daily Telegraph. "To [Customs] it's major, but it's really minor stuff. I just made a mistake ... I misunderstood a few things and we are going through the process." Apparently, Stallone wasn't done misunderstanding the Australian drug laws. When Customs agents arrived at the swank Park Hyatt the next day to deliver the court notice, they noticed something strange by Stallone's hotel window: There was Rocky himself (some reports claim it was members of his entourage), feverishly throwing pills out of the hotel. While one group of agents rushed up to his room, and another was dispatched to search a private jet that Stallone had waiting for him at the airport, a third went to recover the discarded pills. They were later analyzed and found to be testosterone cypionate. As it happens, Stallone was getting some very good medical advice. A study by Sydney's own Garvan Institute found that HGH taken alone doesn't do much except increase fluid retention. However, when taken in conjunction with testosterone, the study found that HGH had a demonstrable effect in one category: sprinting power. Of course, the authors of the study noted that any athlete using them in tandem stood a greater chance of getting caught since drug tests routinely pick up testosterone. But actors didn't get tested for drugs, did they? The question of who advised Stallone was answered when the case eventually came to trial. (He would eventually plead guilty to two counts of importing and possessing prohibited substances.) Although Stallone couldn't produce any prescriptions for the drugs he was carrying, he did submit a note from his doctor, who attested to the fact that he was taking them under medical supervision. The doctor's name was familiar to anyone who had hung around Lyle Alzado at the end of his life-it was Alzado's personal physician, Robert Huizenga. orlando, florida February 27, 2007 Eugene Bolton, a former semi-pro football player, slid the envelope across the table to his lunch mate, a beautiful obstetrician with a side practice in anti-aging medicine. Inside the envelope was $1,750-payment for easy work. According to Bolton, all the doctor had done was sign prescription orders for people she had never met and could scarcely even call patients. The meeting had been arranged by a third person at the table, the business manager for Signature, a pharmacy down the street. Signature belonged to a little-known, but lucrative corner of the pharmaceutical industry called compounding pharmacies. Instead of selling name-brand drugs, compounding pharmacies bought bulk raw materials from around the world and then mixed their own generic drugs. There are hundreds of compounding pharmacies in the United States, but Signature had a special niche. As Bolton knew all too well, it supplied a national network of "wellness centers" that weren't nearly as wholesome as they sounded. The 6-foot-7, 345-pound Bolton called his suburban Houston outfit Cellular Nucleonic Advantage, but the name was just window dressing. He advertised in custom car magazines for people who wanted to get cheap and easy prescriptions, then took orders with his girlfriend over the phone. Once a customer was on board, Bolton sent his or her prescription request to a friendly doctor who would sign it, often for as little as $25. The last stop on the drug chain was Signature, which would fill the prescription and send it back to the customer. According to a report prepared for the World Anti-Doping Agency, an estimated $2 billion worth of HGH has been sold worldwide, and places like Signature were a big reason why. The company imported the raw powder from China through a local businessman. (His main job was, of all things, building stone fountains for mansions, but he went to China frequently enough to have made other connections.) And it was all legal, or at least mostly legal. Unlike steroids, growth hormone wasn't on the federal register of controlled substances; the only way an individual could get in trouble was by not having a prescription. According to the information Bolton provided to authorities, that's where he came in, and why Signature's business manager was eager to help him. In an effort to help him clear more prescriptions, Bolton claimed the executive suggested he strike up a relationship with Claire Godfrey, the anti-aging doctor who also worked as a medical correspondent for Fox TV. The money he was handing over was for 30 prescription forms that she had signed.^{^[1]} What Bolton's lunch mates didn't know was that the ex-lineman was wired for sound. Laws about doctor-patient relationships vary from state to state, but New York has one of the toughest: doctors must see a patient before writing a prescription. Agents working for the District Attorney in Albany, New York, had been looking into doctors who were writing e-mail prescriptions without face-to-face meetings when they stumbled on Bolton's operation. Cornering him, they said that he could cooperate in a case against Signature or take his chances going to jail. Bolton cooperated and the transcript of this lunch proved to be exactly what the lawmen needed. On February 27, they would descend on Signature and arrest Bolton's two lunch mates, along with Signature's owners, a married pair of Orlando pharmacists who had done $36 million worth of business in 2006. (While the principals in the Signature case would plead not guilty, Bolton and his girlfriend both accepted felony charges of filing false prescriptions.) During the raid, the agents would also cart away box loads of patient records that showed Sylvester Stallone was hardly alone in using HGH. One invoice showed that Signature shipped growth hormone to a New York hotel room that was occupied by a member of a major pop star's touring band. Another reportedly showed that Gary Matthews, a 32-year-old outfielder for the Los Angeles Angels, ordered some as well, from a pharmacy in Alabama. (In a statement issued two weeks after the first report, Matthews insisted, "I have never taken HGH.") The NFL would also discover that a doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers purchased $150,000 in performance enhancers with his credit card. (Though dropped from the team's roster, the doctor has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has stated that the HGH he ordered is intended for his older patients.) Beyond that, Arnold Schwarzenegger would be left red-faced on the weekend of the 2007 Arnold Expo when reporters informed him that the man he had just crowned winner of his Arnold Classic, Victor Martinez, had bought steroids from a clinic involved in the case.^{^[2]} The governor's spokesman was left to reply, "Clearly, steroid use is something he is very strongly opposed to." ^{^[3]} shanghai, china Spring 2007 Nothing in the pharmaceutical executive's appearance suggested that he was one of China's largest producers of HGH- nothing, that is, except the pained expression that crossed his face when he was asked about the arrest of Sylvester Stallone. Business had been good lately. His company was among China's fast growing biotech firms and the rows of cubicles outside his office attested to the growing size of his sales staff. Indeed, the executive saw what he was doing as a kind of public service for the people of China. Other drug companies made growth hormone, but the price was astronomical-in some cases as much as $80 a unit. And it didn't have to be. In 2005, Swiss-based Serono labs and its U.S. subsidiaries paid the third largest healthcare fraud recovery in American history-$704 million-after evidence emerged that it was profiting off a drug approved by the FDA solely to treat AIDS wasting syndrome. Once the demand for the drug abated because of the advent of protease inhibitors, Serono created a fraudulent system for measuring body cell mass that qualified thousands of otherwise unqualified patients. This in turn led to Medicaid reimbursements for six-week treatments costing as much as $21,000 each. In the end, scores of patients wound up selling the HGH that they didn't need to bodybuilders and other athletes, simultaneously padding Serono's profits and fueling the black market. The Chinese executive portrayed himself as a pharmaceutical patriot, making HGH for as low as a dollar a unit for his country's needy: children with dwarfism, burn victims, people with AIDS. "The American price is too high for the Chinese people," he explained. "We give them hope." But Stallone's arrest for possession of HGH had brought unwanted attention to his industry. Now the FDA had put certain brands of Chinese HGH on a special watch list so that any shipments directly to the United States could be seized and destroyed. The executive said he hoped to be seen as reputable by the American government, not as a rogue, which was why he recently stopped selling directly to the U.S. through his Web site. "I want the FDA to know we want to be legal," he said. But then he added that he couldn't control where his products went once they were sold to the hospital supply wholesalers who distributed it around China. "The demand is very great," he allowed. What concerned him most was the explosion of counterfeit growth hormone, much of it sold under legitimate brand names, including his own. The technology to manufacture HGH is difficult, but once mastered, it can be easily reproduced. "Some of the people making this have worked for me before," he said knowingly. "But what can I do? They could be in India, Pakistan, maybe even Moscow. They can be anywhere." hanover, new jersey March 12, 2007 To the police in Hanover, New Jersey, it was about to become clear that China's performance enhancement pipeline didn't stop with wellness clinics and anti-aging doctors. It was also fueling a new breed of underground steroid labs that supplied Main Street America. That was evident when they decided to pay a visit to Anthony Cuppari, a volunteer assistant coach for the Hornets of Hanover Park High School. In the fall of 2006, New Jersey became the first state to mandate steroid monitoring, ordering that playoff teams be randomly tested at the start of the new academic year. But the prospect of testing hadn't stopped whispers from circulating about the Hornets. After the team crushed its opening day opponent 42-0, the team's coach, Dan Gregory, told the Morristown Daily Record, "The numbers in the weight room are better than any ever." Looking at game film before a fall 2006 match-up with the Hornets, the coaches at rival Chatham High could see that was no idle boast. These kids were huge. And so was Cuppari, an ex-Hornets running back who worked as personal trainer at a gym in Florham Park. Because of his size, he was impossible to miss prowling the sideline. The Chatham coaches couldn't help but be suspicious. But those suspicions might have remained idle if not for one thing: Just before New Jersey was enacting its steroid testing program, Morris County police arrested 54 people in a probe of prescription painkillers sales around Hanover Park High and two other area high schools. During the course of that probe, they learned that steroids were being peddled along with the painkillers. After a two-month undercover operation, the police obtained search warrants for the home of Cuppari and a friend named Michael Dente. In the first house, they found steroids, GHB, cocaine, and what was later described as "items necessary to the manufacturing process." In the second, they found a fully functional drug lab, complete with a pill press and raw materials from China and elsewhere used to make steroids, Cialis, Viagra, and GHB. Both men were charged with second-degree felony counts involving conspiracy to manufacture the drugs and several counts of drug distribution. (The cases are still pending.) As the sweep broadened, 16 people were arrested, including a 17-year-old Hornets player who allegedly bought GHB-which can be used to mask steroids. A 35-year-old bodybuilder allegedly loaned his drug-making expertise to the crew. And just like that, Hanover, New Jersey, was forced to answer the same question that had already been asked in Colleyville, Texas-the same question that was destined to confront more and more communities: Was it time to make steroid testing in schools even stronger? In Orlando, Florida, a police officer working on the Signature case left little doubt that something had to be done. "We're finding a lot of kids, 15, 16 [ordering steroids]," he told the Palm Beach Post. "It's a simple thing. They get a prepaid credit card at Albertson's, and suddenly they're playing better basketball and their parents don't know why." Meanwhile, a Florida legislator had proposed a pilot program to test one percent of the state's 59,000 football, basketball, and weightlifting athletes. Around the same time, the lieutenant governor of Texas was pushing a bill to target 22,000 of his state's 733,000 public school students. In the midst of all this, researchers at the University of Minnesota released a little-noticed report that raised a question about whether all the legislating was heading in the right direction. Researchers there surveyed 2,516 middle and high school students in 1999, and then followed up again in 2004. What they discovered was that those who were in high school in 1999 were three times less likely to use steroids when they became young adults. In other words, they experimented for a time, got tired of the novelty, and moved on. The survey also noted that most of the use was casual. Among the 1,130 boys who were tracked, only two-or .17 percent-reported using them every day. Slightly more than half of those who used said they did so "a few times in the past year." What was particularly striking about the survey was that all those who admitted experimenting with steroids weren't using them exclusively for sports. Both boys and girls reported trying steroids because they wanted better bodies, albeit for opposite reasons: The boys felt they were too thin, while the girls felt overweight. Given that, did it really make sense for school districts to get into contentious and costly biological wars with their students? The lead author of the study, Patricia van den Berg, considered the question: "It depends on society's aim," she said. "If the aim is its making sports clean, then the answer may be yes. But if the aim is to affect adolescent health, it may be wiser to put the same money into seat belt education, since automobile accidents are a leading cause of death among teenagers." In the end, it all seemed to come down to what Lori Lewis had discovered in Colleyville: The best line of defense is parents who want to know the truth, and coaches who are willing to stand up for it. ^[1] Dr. Godfrey eventually pleaded guilty to criminal diversion of prescription medications and was sentenced to five years' probation. ^[2] Martinez has not been charged and is not named in the indictments. He claimed he was buying testosterone because he had been diagnosed as having low levels by a clinic involved in the larger investigation that had prescribed it. The clinic owners have pleaded not guilty to submitting prescriptions for steroids without a medical need. ^[3] The headlines didn't end there. Eleven wrestlers, including several WWE superstars, were caught in a parallel investigation of a Mobile, Alabama, company called Applied Pharmacy.