A prescription for pain
Pills from docs have a hold on wrestlers

By CHRISTIAN RED & T.J. QUINN
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITERS
Sunday, July 8th 2007, 4:00 AM


When state police and state narcotics officers burst through the door of Dr. David Stephenson's Rome, N.Y., home in March 2005, ready to search for evidence that he had been writing illegal prescriptions, they found his personal stash right on the bedroom nightstand.

Stephenson had GHB and Ketamine, two powerful drugs commonly misused by weightlifters and bodybuilders. To most people, GHB and Ketamine are known as "date rape drugs," anesthetics that can put users into dangerously deep sleep, and can kill when abused.

"He said he just used it for the weightlifting, bodybuilding end of it," says Mark Haskins, the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement agent who was part of the raid. Serious muscle people, after all, know GHB can enhance your body's growth hormone production and give you a cartoonish physique.

Stephenson is serving a six-year state prison sentence for felony criminal sale of a controlled substance, the first physician caught in the ongoing investigation into a national Internet drug trafficking scheme led by the Albany County District Attorney's office.

Stephenson's case came to mind for Haskins last week when the Georgia physician for Chris Benoit, the professional wrestler who killed his wife, his son and himself, was arrested. Dr. Phil Astin III was indicted last week on charges that he illegally prescribed steroids, painkillers and other drugs for Benoit and others. He and Stephenson stood at the doorway between performance-enhancing drugs and a far more sinister world of prescription drug abuse. And when an athlete, whether in wrestling or a "legitimate" sport, steps into that world, experts say he has become part of a larger machine that fuels one of the nation's preeminent public health problems - prescription drug abuse.

From the time in February when Albany County DA P. David Soares announced the extent of "Operation Which Doctor" - the nationwide investigation into clinics, pharmacies and doctors providing illegal prescription drugs - he has insisted the investigation was driven by prescription drug abuse, not athletic performance enhancement, even though the records investigators are poring through are littered with athletes' names.

"I think it's a hidden epidemic, because people don't deal on street corners and people don't see it, so it's easy to ignore, easy to think it's not a problem," says Albany Assistant DA Christopher Baynes, the active prosecutor on the investigation.

To Baynes, the Benoit case brings the point home. Benoit may or may not have been affected by his years of drug use. But much of that extensive use seems to have been with the aid of Astin and possibly other licensed physicians.

"Nobody who takes a hit on a crack pipe thinks they're helping themselves, but with prescription drugs, there's always the illusion when you start that this is something that will benefit you, and it makes it more pernicious," Baynes says. "We're all taught to trust doctors and we're all taught to trust medicine, and when you get something with the imprimatur of the med community, it makes it that much harder to deal with."

Athletes in legitimate sports might not use steroids or any drugs to the extent professional wrestlers do, but law enforcement experts say that when they receive steroids and learn how to take them from hardcore weightlifters, they are swimming in the same waters.

Carlos Ashenoff, the former World Championship Wrestling champion known as Konnan, says for most professional wrestlers the spiral into drugs is rapid, and it begins with steroids.

"You start using steroids because everybody's using steroids," he says, speaking from his home in Chula Vista, Calif., where he is awaiting a kidney transplant. "No one tells you you have to, but the only guys making money are the guys on steroids."

In the early 1990s, when steroids were first classified as controlled substances by the federal government and most physicians would insist there was no proof they enhanced athletic performance, Ashenoff was one of the thousands of weightlifters, bodybuilders and professional wrestlers who conducted research on their own bodies, figuring out which combinations of drugs led to the kind of ripped physique that a 12-year-old fan would want on a poster in his room. He blames his kidney disease on painkiller abuse, but believes the steroids contributed to the hip he had replaced earlier this year.

Ashenoff was still a young man in the Navy, looking at a life in wrestling, when he decided to start juicing, he says.

"I just went to a bodybuilder I saw on a military base and said, 'How do I get on the juice and what do I got to take?' Once I was on it I'd ask other wrestlers, 'What do you take? How much?'" he says. "The doctors said, 'This will not enhance athletic performance.' It did the opposite. They'd say, 'Steroids, it's bad for you.' We'd say, 'No it isn't, and we're all huge.'"

As any steroid user will attest, the drugs might be dangerous, but they definitely work.

"Then you start taking painkillers because then you start getting hurt and you're afraid of losing your spot," Ashenoff says. "The more you work the more money you make; everybody's working through pain on painkillers."

Sean Waltman, a former champion under the names Syxx and X-Pac, says he developed an addiction to painkillers after his friend Curt (Mr. Perfect) Henning (who died of a cocaine overdose in 2003) first provided them.

"Now, I'm definitely not blaming Curt for getting addicted to painkillers," says Waltman, 34, who no longer wrestles. "I choose not to point the finger at anyone but ourselves. But back then, the ring was really hard. I was working 300 days a year. A lot of traveling. It was --- miserable."

Some wrestlers would take human growth hormone to help recover from their injuries. Some would take amphetamines to get through workouts and matches, then take GHB and Ketamine to sleep.

At night, Ashenoff says, the parties were "outrageous." "It was, 'Here's some coke, here's some pot, here's some meth,'" he says. "We had raves we went to all night, everybody on (Ecstasy) and GHB."

Glenn Gilbertti, known to wrestling fans as Disco Inferno, echoes Ashenoff's portrayal of life after the lights went down and the mikes were turned off. At the height of WCW in the late '90s before it went under in 2001, Gilbertti says wrestlers lived "like rock stars" from city to city.

"We couldn't wait to get to the bar after each show," says the 38-year-old Gilbertti, who still performs at military bases. "The wrestlers, announcers, everybody was rushing to the nearest bar to get a seat. You had just performed in front of a live audience, the adrenaline was pumping, it was literally like we were rock stars."

He adds that GHB was often a drug of choice to complement the booze, but that many abused it to the point of embarrassing themselves.

"With GHB, there's a reason it is so good. If you experiment with it - we call a dosage a 'cap' - it gives you this great buzz. But there's a very fine line between taking a cap and abusing it," Gilbertti says. "You'd have guys getting what I call 'G'd out.' They'd take way more than a dosage and next thing you know they were asleep in their soup."

GHB was "huge" in the early 90s, Ashenoff says, and he too saw the scary effects.

"Guys urinated on themselves during flights. A lot of guys did too much of it," he says.

Ashenoff is not sure, however, whether he ever experienced the epically painful withdrawal that many GHB addicts suffer.

"We took so much (stuff) you didn't know what (the withdrawal) was from," he says.

And through it all there never was a concern about where the next pill would come from.

Wrestlers refer to fans who take their profession seriously as "marks," Ashenoff says, and "everybody knows a doctor who's a mark."

Original article can be found here.