Bitter pills: Some NFL players slide into opioid addiction in bid to stay on the field

Two pills.

That's how it started. Shane Olivea had just finished his first season with the San Diego Chargers, starting and being named to the NFL's All-Rookie team. But the introduction to pro football had taken a toll on his body, and a teammate told him about a friend who could get him something that would help. A couple of pops of Vicodin. It's the same stuff they give people who have wisdom teeth pulled, so how bad could it be?

Olivea would soon find out. Within three years, he would be out of the NFL, largely because of an addiction to painkillers that blossomed from two or three pills a day at first to his snorting ground-up OxyContin, an opioid, before taking the field for games.

"I never took another snap where I wasn't under the influence of opioids," Olivea said of the remaining 2 1/2 seasons in which he was a starter for the Chargers. He described his situation as "playing under the influence," and described the feeling as if he'd walked onto the field after having a couple of drinks.

"You're high, you're stoned," he said. "I wasn't loopy. I was high, you get a high effect. . . . You're not drunk but you're buzzed. You know you're buzzed. You're coherent but you're not all there."

Olivea, now 33, played offensive tackle for the Chargers and at Ohio State, where he was a three-year starter. He grew up in Long Beach, but his family moved to Atlantic Beach and he played for Lawrence High School his senior year. During his NFL career, from 2004 to 2007, he was listed at 6-4 and 325 pounds. Originally a seventh-round draft pick, he signed a $20-million extension in 2006. By then, he was already hooked.

He would routinely take $20,000 in cash out of the bank, slip across the border from San Diego to Mexico in a taxicab, and come back with a month's supply. In all, he figures he spent around $530,000 in cash on medications that soon took over his life, ruined his career, and nearly killed him. When he checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, in the spring of 2008 after an intervention by his family, doctors there told him he should not have survived the amount of drugs he had been taking.

"The best way I describe it to people is I was married to football and the pills were my mistress," Olivea said of the start of his dalliances, which were kept secret from the team and other players. "And then within a four-year span, my mistress was sitting at the dinner table and my wife was not in the house anymore. It sucked the life out of me. It affected every relationship I had, especially with my teammates."

Olivea suspects he's not the only one who has gone through an NFL career high on painkillers. More alarming -- and more well-documented -- are the rates at which former players removed from the structure and resources of their NFL teams turn to the pills that are so easily available.

In a survey conducted by Newsday in conjunction with the NFL Players Association's former players division, retired players were asked if they currently take prescription painkillers for injuries suffered during their careers, and 27.3 percent (208 of 763) said yes. (Respondents were not asked whether the medications had been legally obtained.) The survey also asked if they took prescription painkillers during their careers; 64.9 percent (495) said yes.

Use, and misuse

A 2010 study of NFL veterans by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis focused on painkillers specifically and found that 7 percent of the former players were currently using painkilling opioid drugs and 71 percent of those who used opioids during their careers -- prescription drugs such as oxycodone, Vicodin, Percocet -- went a step further and said they "misused" them (for example, took them for reasons or in doses other than the prescription). That study also found that 63 percent got their drugs either exclusively from a nonmedical source or a combination of both doctors and illicit sources such as a teammate, coach, athletic trainer, family member or street dealer.

The bottom line of the study: Former players are roughly four times more likely to use painkilling opioid drugs than the general population. That naturally increases the likelihood of addiction, which is already at epidemic proportions in the United States. According to federal statistics, more than 2 million Americans are addicted to painkillers.

"The dangers [of painkiller addiction] aren't really prevalent until long after the careers are over. That's the problem," said Frank Mattiace, a former NFL and United States Football League player who is now a licensed drug and alcohol counselor and director of New Pathway Counseling Center in Paramus, New Jersey.

Stress of the game

Mel Owens, a former NFL linebacker who is now a disability attorney in California and represents hundreds of players, put it bluntly.

"If you took all the medication out of the NFL, you'd have no league," Owens said. "You go in as a healthy guy at 21 or 22 years old and just the massive amounts of medication they give you and the stress and strain of the game, you're just ruined."

Former Jets quarterback Ray Lucas was. He said he became hooked on opioid painkillers after his career ended because of a neck injury. He didn't have insurance and couldn't afford corrective surgery, so he began dulling the "excruciating" pain with medication. Like Olivea, he started out with just a few pills.

"Before you know it, you go from 100 pills a month to 400 pills a month, 800 pills a month, 1,200 pills, 1,500 pills a month which you don't get from doctors," said Lucas, who was receiving prescriptions from three different doctors and also buying on the black market, a habit that nearly bankrupted his family. "I was getting them from everywhere. Anything I could get my hands on. Roxies, oxys, Percocets, Vicodins. You name it, I took it, whatever the strength was."

It got so bad for Lucas that he contemplated suicide. He planned to drive his SUV off the George Washington Bridge, he said, before receiving help for his addiction.

"There were times where at night I'd take 50 and say, 'Thank God I won't be waking up tomorrow,' " Lucas said. "It's pitch black. There is no light and there is no hope and there is no looking forward to anything. It just becomes darker and darker and you can't do anything to get it to stop."

New protocols

Troy Vincent, a former Pro Bowl player who is now NFL executive vice president of football operations, said there are new protocols in the league these days to educate players on the ramifications -- both in the present and the future -- of the medications they are taking. In terms of doling out pills, many NFL teams have taken the onus off their physicians in recent years and now use third-party companies registered with the Drug Enforcement Administration to deliver prescription medications to players at team sites. Those companies also maintain usage logs that can be tracked by the league.

"We're really trying to step up our efforts by educating not just the player but his influences that are around him about the long-term effects of painkillers," Vincent said of reaching out to wives and parents, as well. "It's become one of our core areas of education as we talk about heart disease, cancer, pain medicine and long-term treatment."

Language on the use of painkillers and policies for the care of addicted players was even added into the most recent collective-bargaining agreement signed in 2011. In December, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by 1,300 former players against the NFL, writing that the collective-bargaining agreement between the league and the union was the appropriate forum to resolve claims that teams damaged the players by routinely dispensing painkillers.

Asking for help

Olivea said the Chargers were not aware of his addiction until it began to affect his performance. By then, it was too late. He didn't know how to stop. He didn't know he could ask for help.

"Pride, it's one of those sins," Olivea said. "Pride got me to the NFL, my pride got me out of the NFL . . . The game of football always came easy to me. The crazy thing is that the game of life kicked my [butt]."

Olivea says he has been clean for more than six years and is still trying to catch on with an NFL team. He's been living and training in the Phoenix area for several years.

"I spent my whole life training to get to the NFL and in less than four years, I kind of ruined it," he said. "I never played a game clean . If I can be that good stoned, how good can I be clean? That's the only thing that's a thorn in my side."

He's also close to finishing his degree in communications from Ohio State. If he doesn't get an NFL job this offseason, he said, he'll likely turn to coaching. He said his experiences can help him not only teach techniques and skills but also possibly steer young players away from the pitfalls of prescription medicines that he fell into.

"Having played in the NFL and also with my personal story, I could possibly help someone going down the wrong path or allow them to see what can happen," he said. "I'm in a unique spot."

Unfortunately, he's not.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.