A former steroid dealer named David Jacobs (now deceased) has come out and said that he supplied Michael Vick with steroids when Vick was a member of the Falcons.

From the Dallas Morning News:

Authorities said Jacobs ran one of the largest doping networks in the country before he was arrested in May 2007.

The new document, which summarizes Vick’s interview with investigators, surfaced because of open records requests by media outlets.

Agents told Vick that a DEA informant said that Vick was talking about steroids and human growth hormone with someone at the Falcons party and that Vick was overheard saying he “liked his product.”
Vick immediately denied to the investigators that the conversation ever happened and said he did not use performance-enhancing drugs.

Names, other than Vick’s, were redacted from the government summary, so it’s not clear whether the DEA informant referred to was Jacobs.

But in several interviews with The News that took place in the months before authorities say Jacobs killed himself and his girlfriend in June 2008, Jacobs said that at that 2006 gathering he was with Vick and other players who used his drugs.

Baseball has long been the focal point for performance-enhancing drugs in sports, but it would be naïve to think that drugs aren’t being used in other sports. After all, steroids first gained national attention thanks to the Olympics decades again. I don’t want to make generalized claims without having hard facts, but again, it would be naïve to think that baseball players are the only ones doping to gain a competitive advantage.

Whether the claims that Vick used performance-enhancers are true or false, I wonder if this story will lead to more national attention being paid to drugs in the NFL. The general public is willing to look the other way when it comes to drug suspensions in football because the league is wildly popular, but cheaters exists in all walks of life.

That said, the NFL appears to have a handle on its drug testing. The league has a banned substance list a mile long and players can’t even take cold medicine without having it checked out by team doctors. I’m I suggesting that the league is completely clean? No, but I trust that the NFL has done a better job monitoring its athletes than MLB did in the late 80s and throughout the past two decades.

It’ll be interesting to see if more reports surface in the wake of this Vick story. He hasn’t been convicted of anything, but if there’s one thing we know about Vick is that if he’s guilty of something, he always finds a way to get caught.

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