A federal judge from the Northern District of California has granted the NFL’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by several former players, who claimed the league supported an environment in which prescription drugs and controlled substances were “illegally administered” by athletic trainers and other medical professionals.
In so ruling, the judge found that Section 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) preempted the plaintiffs’ common law claims. More generally, the players and the league had agreed to a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that placed responsibility for administering prescription drugs on the teams, not the league.
The plaintiffs, who collectively played in the NFL for 16 different teams over 40 seasons from 1969 — 2008, included Jeremy Newberry, Richard Dent, Roy Green, Keith Van Horne, Ron Stone, Jim McMahon, J.D. Hill and Ron Pritchard.
More than 600 other former NFL players joined the lawsuit, leveling numerous allegations against the NFL, including:
“…NFL has illegally and unethically substituted pain medications for proper health care…”
“…medications were often administered without a prescription and with little regard for a player’s medical history or potentially-fatal interactions with other medications. Administering medications in this cavalier manner constitutes a fundamental misuse of carefully-controlled prescription medications and a clear danger to the players.”
“NFL directly and indirectly supplied players with and encouraged players to use opioids to manage pain before, during and after games in a manner the NFL knew or should have known constituted a misuse of the medications and violated Federal drug laws.”
The league moved to dismiss, leading to the instant opinion.
After establishing that the LMRA requires that a CBA be the first line of defense in settling such disputes, the court turned to the plaintiffs’ contention that there are “common law duties” in each of the various states whose law would apply and vaguely suggest that all such states would impose the same uniform duty on the league to oversee the clubs.”
But there is “a problem” with this argument in that “no decision in any state (including California) has ever held that professional sports league owed such a duty to intervene and stop mistreatment by the league’s independent clubs.”
The court went on to note that “the league has taken may steps to address the issue of player medical care by imposing in the clubs detailed provisions in numerous collective bargaining agreements between the player’s union and the NFL from 1968 onward. … Through these CBAs, players’ medical rights have steadily expanded.”
It added that “contrary to the plaintiffs’ arguments, the lengths the NFL has gone to imposing duties on clubs to protect the health and safety of the players cannot be ignored in evaluating whether or not it has been careless.”
The court went on to site extensive case law in support of preemption, including Stringer v. NFL, 474 F. Supp. 2d 894, 898-99, 910-11 (S.D. Ohio 2007), Duerson v. NFL, No. 12 C 2513, 2012 WL 1658353, at 3—4* (N.D. Ill. May 11, 2012), and Smith v. NFLPA (in this issue)
Conceding that his order “does not minimize the underlying societal issue,” the court offer the following conclusion:
“In such a rough-and-tumble sport as professional football, player injuries loom as a serious and inevitable evil. Proper care of these injuries is likewise a paramount need. The main point of this order is that the league has addressed these serious concerns in a serious way — by imposing duties on the clubs via collective bargaining and placing a long line of health-and-safety duties on the team owners themselves. These benefits may not have been perfect, but they have been uniform across all clubs and not left to the vagaries of state common law.”
Dent et al. v. NFL; N.D. Cal.; No. C 14-02324 WHA; 12/17/14
