Yahoo Sports!/Football Outsiders/Everywhere else’s Doug Farrar gets an interview with a doctor from Aegis Sciences Corporation, which is a private company that offers drug testing. The doctor on record, Dr. David Black, provides some telling information on the NFL’s drug system when it comes to HCG.
So, the NFL does not use Mass Spectrometry? “Not in this test. The NFL uses Mass Spectrometry In virtually all other tests, For this test, they just use the combination of the two different screening tests, which should not be standard practice for identifying if someone has used HCG. This is the way the Anti-Doping Agency approaches testing for this particular compound, and the NFL has generally adopted their approach. But because there are so few [non-negative results], and there’s a lot of expense in conducting a Mass Spectrometry test, some scientists believe that it’s acceptable. But this would certainly not be acceptable if it were a cocaine positive, or any other drug. If it were any other drug, it would require Mass Spectrometry identification.”
I didn’t become a sports writer because of my wizardry with science terms, so please go check out the whole piece, but it appears to me that the NFL is operating it’s HCG tests without a court-acceptable confirmation technology.
Hat tip to Steph Stradley for being all over this story this morning. Check out her blogs (FanHouse and Chronicle) on it as well.