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| Derek Boogard being interviewed for WCCO If you would like to use this photo please leave a comment here, contact me via Flickrmail, or email nvjorgen [at] yahoo dot com. If you see this photo on the net leave a comment with a link to the page. Thanks. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
If you haven't seen this article you might want to take a look at it. Personally, I can't believe what I just read - I have to think that someone has some explaining to do and there seems to be some questions that beg to be answered. This article does not paint a pretty picture about
Derek Boogaard's addiction and maybe this newspaper article might bring to light some things that need to be addressed going forward, most of us don't want to see anymore players' life cut short by an overdose or have their life ruined by a drug addiction.
John Branch, New York Times --- In his final three seasons playing in the National Hockey League, before dying last year at 28 of an accidental overdose of narcotic painkillers and alcohol, Derek Boogaard received more than 100 prescriptions for thousands of pills from more than a dozen team doctors for the Minnesota Wild and the Rangers.
A trove of documents, compiled by Boogaard’s father, offer a rare prescription-by-prescription history of the care given to a prominent, physically ailing athlete who struggled with addiction to some of the very drugs the team doctors were providing. The scores of prescriptions came before and after Boogaard’s entry into the league’s substance-abuse program in September 2009 for an addiction to painkillers and sleeping pills.
Among the findings:
¶ In a six-month stretch from October 2008 to April 2009, while playing 51 games, Boogaard received at least 25 prescriptions for the painkillers hydrocodone or oxycodone, a total of 622 pills, from 10 doctors — eight team doctors of the Wild, an oral surgeon in Minneapolis and a doctor for another N.H.L. team.
