That Time an NFL Team Used Truth Serum on an Injured Player

They had private investigators reporting on his movements. They had seen the swelling in his knee. They had seen him grimace with every step. They had heard him say that he was in pain. But still, they couldn't be sure.

So they got a needle, and filled it with sodium pentothal—truth serum.

It was 1986, and NFL running back Joe McCall was on the verge of limping out of the league. As far as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were concerned, however, he couldn't limp fast enough. McCall was taking up time, space, and, most importantly, money.

"Peanuts," says McCall, now 52 and still incredulous. "My contract was peanuts."

He can't recall the precise dollar amount, but for a running back on his third team and with the same number ofcareer rushing yards, he knows he wasn't getting any more than the league minimum of around $60,000.

But this was the Bucs, a team about to begin its second 2-14 season in a row, its third in four years. Their culture was "a little bit different," McCall says. The franchise might never have brought in another running back had their number one draft pick, a college superstar named Bo Jackson, actually joined the team. Befitting one of the NFL's most dysfunctional franchises, the Bucs lost out on Jackson and turned down a San Francisco trade offer of future Hall of Fame defensive back Ronnie Lott, running back Wendell Tyler, and draft picks in exchange for Jackson's rights.

And so McCall ended up on a table in the team doctor's office during training camp, about to begin a last ditch attempt to figure out what was keeping him off the field.

To be fair, no one seemed to know. The team hadn't bothered to do a complete MRI scan of his knee, McCall says. But the ailing joint had a history. After being drafted in the third round in 1984 by the Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Raiders, he hurt it five games into his rookie season. With running backs Marcus Allen and Kenny King on their roster, the Raiders had no reason to wait on McCall and his balky knee, and let him go the next season. He was claimed off waivers by the Indianapolis Colts, but the injury hadn't yet healed and he was again released. After taking a year off to rehabilitate, he joined the Buccaneers.

Tampa Bay knew all this when it signed McCall, but the club was hopeful that his body was better, that he could contribute—even just a little bit—to righting a listing ship. McCall was hopeful, too. But gradually, over two-a-days and preseason games, his knee wore down. He simply couldn't go, and now the Bucs were victims not only of bad luck, but also of the NFL's labor rules. Teams can't just release an injured player outright. Instead, they're on the hook for his salary until he's cleared to play. Some teams will arrange settlements, estimating the time the player will miss, paying him for those weeks, and cutting him. Otherwise, they have to tend to his injury until it or his contract are resolved. This costs money.

But what if Tampa Bay could get rid of an injured McCall without fulfilling his contract? What if there was a way to prove that he wasn't injured—that he was a faker, a malingerer?

That's what the Bucs needed to do if they wanted to avoid shelling out any more peanuts. The PIs hadn't turned up anything, just a player hobbling back and forth from his hotel to the training facility. So the franchise placed its hopes in the hands of it physicians.When McCall sat down on the table, team doctors told him they were going to perform a test to determine the cause of his pain. "I'm thinking that they're gonna give me an examination," McCall says. It was more of an inquisition.

Sodium pentothal is an anesthetic. It's used by hospitals to put people under for surgery. It's used by prisons in lethal injections. But it is also known as "truth serum" because it's supposed to overwhelm the capacity to lie, to get anyone to talk against their better judgment. It has a long history of use by police and the CIA. During World War II, it was sometimes given in large doses to soldiers dazed by combat, in preparation to return them to the front.

That sodium pentothal gets people talking—but not reliably telling the truth—was well-understood by the 1950s, yet in the following decades employers would sometimes still insist on its use to verify workers' compensation claims. The CIA likely still uses it too. A tool that might tell you what you want to hear is too valuable to lose on trifling grounds like accuracy.

The doctors kept McCall semi-conscious, because they needed him to be able to answer questions. "Once you push the sodium pentothal, you don't feel anything," McCall says. "But [the knee pain] was still that bad, that I still felt a little bit." Tough luck for the Bucs. They might have simply tricked his body into forgetting the pain. Now they had to see if they could fool his mind.

Where's your pain? Where does it hurt? Does it hurt when I do this? Does it hurt when I do that? When did you get hurt? How long have you been hurt? Are you really hurt?

McCall answered truthfully. He did not confess to faking. And why would he? He really was injured. His knee hurt like hell. On the other hand, sodium pentothal can get people to say just about anything. That's why statements given under the drug's influence aren't admissible as evidence in a court of law. Fortunately,Tampa Bay's doctors didn't need to probe the hidden recesses of McCall's mind, not when they could simply see that his damn knee was swollen.

Only never mind that: having added insult to injury, the team doubled down after a drugged-up McCall told them what they didn't want to hear and released him anyway.

When McCall spoke to the Washington Post's Bill Brubaker in 1993 about his treatment by the Bucs, his emotions were still raw. "That was no way to treat a human being," he said. Today, he's more inclined to laugh. Which is what he did when reminded of the name of the team's longtime physician, Joseph Diaco. "That's his name," he says, guffawing like a guy being reminded of the class brownnoser. "That's his name."

"He was a real team doctor," McCall says, with an attention to wordplay befitting a guy who taught high school English after retiring. "He didn't care about the players whatsoever."

Diaco, who was the Bucs' chief physician from 1976 to 2012, declined a VICE Sports request for comment, but he told the Washington Post in 1993 that the sodium pentothal wasn't his idea—rather, it was the brainchild of an orthopedist who was no longer with the team. Diaco merely watched. And it was just that one time.

Why all that for Joe McCall? Surely, McCall says, it wasn't just him. "Why would you do that for one guy?" he asks. "Who had a contract worth peanuts?" McCall certainly wasn't the only guy who ever got tailed. In the 1993 Post story, teams freely admitted hiring investigators to shadow players, a common tactic to check on workers' comp claims. McCall said his union rep told him that the Bucs had even installed cameras in his hotel room. "I couldn't believe this was a NFL team that was doing this," McCall says. "They had people following us day and night,"—him and a lot of other walking pay stubs NFL teams would rather part with. But apparently his piddling contract was the only one a team was so desperate to get rid of that it would drive them to drugs.

"I don't know about that," McCall says.

Not that he thinks much about the whole affair anymore. He sued the Bucs to get the money he was owed while he worked as a teacher for the next seven years. He finally won a claim to $30,000 and some severance in 1992. Not long after, he became a fireman, which he's still doing in his hometown of Miami.

McCall still watches the game, but he never forgets that it's a business. He's remarkably informed about theshadiness of the league's concussion settlement and sees the good old days of the game with clarity. "During the 80s," he says, "that was crazy. It was all about being a team player." You were supposed to sacrifice it all for your teammates.

One of the most self-sacrificing—read: craziest—players from that era, Jack Youngblood, played through the 1979 playoffs and 1980 Pro Bowl with a broken leg. (That's right: he played through a severe injury in the Pro Bowl). Last year, Youngbloodtold the New York Post that guys who missed time with an injury back then didn't just have to explain themselves to their untrusting employers—they had to explain themselves to their own teammates. Rather than fake injuries to swindle their way into bogus workers' compensation claims, it has always been much more common for NFL players to fake health.

In the same New York Post story, Antrel Rolle says he hid not one, but two rotator cuff tears from team doctors. In 1974, the team doctor for the Los Angeles Rams told the Washington Post that he'd learned to check both legs for injuries because limping players liked to trick him by presenting the wrong one. The marginal guys, it is generally understood, are the most likely to fake good health, knowing how tenuous their hold on a roster spot can be.

Now, McCall says, star players at least are learning to look out for themselves: "You want to have team spirit, and you want to be there for your team, but at the end of the day, it's about business. Once you're hurt, that's it, you're done."

Currently, the NFL is being sued by a group of former players who allege that the league and its teams were too cavalier about dispensing painkillers. The same players claim that team doctors placed short-term team goals—playing, winning—above long-term athlete health, numbing hurt players so they could remain on the field, where they further aggravated their injuries. McCall can relate. "Who didn't get injected before a game?" he says, "Everybody took that shot before the game. Every guy that played the game." If the doctors didn't administer the relief, they let the players do so. In the Raiders locker room, McCall remembers what the team doctor referred to as "the candy jar," a big jar full of different types of painkillers. "You didn't have to get a prescription," McCall says. "You knew what to get, so you'd just stick your hand in and get as many as you needed." Other locker rooms operated in the same way.

In a drug-soaked environment where the ends almost always justified the means, is it really shocking that an NFL team doctor would shoot a player full of a substance that was used by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a top-secret mind control program? As McCall emphasized about Diaco, when a player enters a team's training facility, he's not dealing with his doctor but "their doctor." There's a difference. When McCall finally went to his own doctor back in 1986—make that his mom's doctor; McCall was still on her insurance, because players back then weren't paid like they are today—he was told in simple terms that he had an arthritic, degenerative condition in his knee.

Does it still hurt?

"Yes," McCall says with a laugh. "I have [pain] right now. On certain days it swells up. If I go out dancing, it swells up…but you live with it."

The weather in Miami is usually kind to the knee that kept McCall from the success he wanted in football. If his claim to fame is being the one player an NFL team interrogated under sodium pentothal, he'll take it. But from what McCall knows of the league, he has a hard time believing that's the truth.