Further Notes on the WWE Wrestlers and Applied Pharmacy

Some clarification on the post here yesterday about the six wrestlers named in the case against the Applied Pharmacy figures who were convicted this week in federal court.

Kurt Angle, Randy Orton, Adam “Edge” Copeland, Gregory Shane “Hurricane” Helms, Oscar “Rey Mysterio” Gutierrez, and the late Eddie Guerrero indeed all were linked to Applied, but the links are not directly based on the trial record. The 2007 series of articles at the Sports Illustrated website — which are more commonly described as explanations of the athlete names that emerged during the prosecution of Signature Pharmacy, another “compounding” drugstore that did business over the Internet and in association with “wellness” clinics and unscrupulous doctors — was the source of the item published yesterday at the website of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

In their March 19 2007, article, SI reporters Luis Fernando Llosa and L. Jon Wertheim wrote that Copeland and Helms were documented to have received Human Growth Hormone. And “virtually all the other [wrestlers named -- among them, Angle, Orton, Gutierrez, and Guerrero] allegedly received a wide variety of anabolic steroids” from Applied Pharmacy.

Prior to this week’s conviction in the Applied trial, an Arizona physician, David A. Wilbirt, and his fiancée, Candace V. Toler, both already had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to illegally dispensing and distributing anabolic steroids, and Wilbirt’s “patients” included the wrestlers.

My post yesterday errantly said it was quoting Dave Meltzer. I actually was quoting the daily update on the website of Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer. Yesterday’s update was written by Meltzer’s associate Bryan Alvarez, publisher of another wrestling newsletter, Figure Four Weekly.

This is all much ado about nothing in one basic respect: Pro wrestlers and WWE performers appear disproportionately on the celebrity and athlete customer lists of all the busted and shady Internet pharmacies. On that, you can Apply your Signature. The business experience Linda McMahon touts in her Senate campaign is in an exceedingly dirty business.


Irv Muchnick