Dozens of S. Florida police officers, firefighters

[Junkyard Dog]

Dozens of S. Florida police officers, firefighters linked to steroid use

By Peter Franceschina
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

They never saw a doctor, didn't even talk to one by phone.

The 13 West Palm Beach police officers facing suspensions for buying anabolic steroids told internal investigators they thought they had valid prescriptions because each had established a doctor-patient relationship to get the drugs.

The company they patronized, the now-defunct PowerMedica in Deerfield Beach, was part of an online boom in anti-aging and hormone replacement clinics. Such clinics have popped up all over South Florida, operating in a murky area of the law, and they are drawing more scrutiny from regulators. Federal investigators raided PowerMedica in February 2004, and it closed a few months later.

PowerMedica's founder, Daniel L. Dailey, said 50 or 60 law enforcement officers and firefighters from around the country were on his client list.

"Do you think I would invite police to do business with us if we thought we were doing anything wrong?" Dailey said.

One Food and Drug Administration investigator told police that she and federal prosecutors were so concerned by the number of South Florida law enforcement officers who were PowerMedica customers that they took an unusual step in an active investigation -- they alerted the police agencies for public safety reasons.

"We were very concerned that something could happen and we might be held liable for it," FDA investigator Julie Pahutsky told West Palm Beach police internal investigators.

At least eight Broward Sheriff's deputies who used PowerMedica were cleared of wrongdoing by an internal affairs investigation. The Broward Sheriff's Office won't release details of those cases because of the ongoing FDA probe.

Four Palm Beach County deputies and three Delray Beach officers also used the company. Two of the Palm Beach deputies were given one-day suspensions for not telling their supervisors they were taking the drugs. Two of the Delray officers were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing in internal investigations released Thursday, while the third officer is still under investigation, police spokesman Jeff Messer said.

The officers' prescriptions weren't signed by the doctor they thought was signing them -- another doctor with a troubled history was forging the prescriptions, according to federal investigators. That doctor had her New York medical license suspended for drug and alcohol abuse, was convicted for the unauthorized practice of medicine and was hit with a $40 million jury verdict in a patient's cosmetic-surgery death.

The officers simply did what others did: They got their drugs by filling out a medical questionnaire and submitting to a single blood test, which were to be reviewed by a doctor.

Web sites devoted to steroids advertise this as the legal way to obtain the drugs, but that is under debate. But it is clearly illegal to go to a foreign-based Web sites to purchase the drugs and have them shipped to the United States.

At the heart of the West Palm Beach internal police investigation was whether the officers had legitimate doctor-patient relationships. The internal investigation concluded that they didn't. Police Benevolent Association lawyer Gary Lippman says they did: "All a doctor needs to prescribe medication is a medical history and lab work. They [officers] filled out those forms, and they went and had their blood tested."

When questioned by skeptical investigators, the officers expressed no qualms about buying anabolic steroids not covered by their medical insurance, as well as syringes and needles, and injecting themselves. One officer's wife, a PowerMedica saleswoman, hand-delivered the drugs in sealed white paper bags. The officers told investigators they believed PowerMedica was legitimate.

Lt. Jack Yates, a 25-year veteran, spent nearly $8,000 on the drugs. He told investigators he stopped when the fellow officer's wife told him the FDA raided the company.

"Nothing came to my attention that would have made me think for one second that this place was illegitimate whatsoever," Yates told investigators.