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c.2012 New York Times News Service<

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 New York 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.

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 NHL team.

— In the fall of 2010, an official for the Rangers, Boogaard's new team, was notified of Boogaard's recurring abuse of narcotic pain pills. Nonetheless, a Rangers team dentist soon wrote the first of five prescriptions for hydrocodone for Boogaard.

— Another Rangers doctor, although aware that Boogaard also had been addicted to sleeping pills in the past, wrote nearly 10 prescriptions for Ambien during Boogaard's lone season with the team.

The records reveal the ease with which Boogaard received prescription drugs — often shortly after sending a text message to a team doctor's cellphone and without a notation made in team medical files. They also show the breadth of the drugs being prescribed, from flu medications and decongestants to antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills.

Most striking, though, are the narcotic painkillers and sleeping pills, which Boogaard had a history of abusing.

''To see him have all that access to those doctors and all those prescriptions, that is mind boggling," said Dr. Louis Baxter Sr., the executive medical director of the Professional Assistance Program of New Jersey and immediate past president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. "He had such easy access to prescription medicines."

The records paint an incomplete picture. They do not show what Boogaard told doctors or the degree to which he may have misled them. They do not indicate what the doctors knew, if anything, about Boogaard's pursuit of drugs bought illicitly on his own. They do not reflect whether the doctors knew what other doctors were diagnosing or prescribing.

But, at the least, the records raise questions for hockey and professional sports of all kinds. Do team doctors communicate with one another about the care they are giving or the drugs they are prescribing? Do they demand to see a player before writing a new prescription? Are team medical records monitored and complete? How much information is shared among doctors, team officials and administrators of programs like the NHL's Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program?

The NHL, teams, team doctors and substance-abuse program directors involved in Boogaard's care all declined to discuss any of that.

The league, the Wild and the Rangers were given specific examples of the care that Boogaard received. Each released two-sentence written statements defending the care and citing the guidance of the league's Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health program.

None of the doctors mentioned in this article would comment. Neither would Dr. Brian Shaw or Dr. David Lewis, co-directors of the Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health program that they founded in 1996 through the NHL and its players association. They took on oversight of Boogaard's care after he was placed in rehabilitation in 2009, and they oversee similar programs for the National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer.

A PLAYER NEEDING HELP

After Boogaard died on May 13, 2011, his family donated his brain to researchers at Boston University. In October, the family learned that Derek had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head.

But Boogaard's father, Len, wanted to know more. He has been a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for most of 30 years. He set out on a hunt for documentation of his son's life and the care he received as things went from bad to worse to unthinkable in Derek's final years.

He requested and received Derek's medical records from the Wild. The Rangers initially refused, but Boogaard eventually received them through the players association. He asked for records from the private practices of team doctors, too, and received them from most.

It seems certain that the records received were not complete. Many were missing pages. One practice's file did not include a particular doctor who cared for Boogaard extensively.

Len Boogaard also obtained pharmacy records for his son through various drugstore chains. They provided store-by-store accounts of Derek Boogaard's prescriptions. He was sent his son's drug-test results. He obtained a stack of notes from Derek's stays at two California rehabilitation clinics.

He had hundreds of pages of Derek's cellphone records. He had Derek's bank and credit-card records, showing everything from fast-food purchases to binges of ATM withdrawals totaling thousands of dollars, believed to be used when Derek bought more painkillers from dealers.

Len Boogaard knows that his son supplemented his drug habit with purchases of pills from dealers in Minneapolis; New York; and Regina, Saskatchewan. But he has found no sign of abuse until injuries sustained in fights were followed by steady streams of pills provided by team doctors.

''Derek was an addict," Len Boogaard said. "But why was he an addict? Everyone said he had 'off-ice' issues. No, it was hockey."

At 7:11 p.m. on the date Derek Boogaard died, about an hour after the Minneapolis police say he was given at least one Percocet (oxycodone and acetaminophen) pill by his brother Aaron, Derek called Dan Cronin, a counselor for the league substance-abuse program, phone records show. The call lasted a minute. Boogaard and Cronin then exchanged seven texts over a 12-minute period.

Boogaard went barhopping with friends and Aaron that night. Aaron and another brother found Derek's dead body in his apartment the next afternoon.

Len Boogaard later contacted Cronin to ask about the nature of the exchange. Cronin, in an email, cited "privacy rules" and declined to answer Len Boogaard's questions. He declined to answer questions from The New York Times, too.

The Times shared Len Boogaard's research with several outside experts in the drug and addiction fields. Most were reluctant to comment on Boogaard's precise care.

But they took note of the persistently high dosages of medications Boogaard was prescribed, and the seeming lack of a primary doctor overseeing his care.

Baxter, from the American Society of Addiction Medicine, cited a three-step process for addicts: detoxification, rehabilitation and continuing care.

''Continuing care is probably the most important part," Baxter said. "And it looks like he didn't have much of that."

Boogaard's case provides a window into a world usually shuttered to outsiders. Like most major professional sports teams, the Wild and the Rangers have many doctors — eight for the Wild, seven for the Rangers — from orthopedic surgeons to dentists.

Team doctors often want to help athletes return to competition, so "the tendency is to overtreat," said Dr. Jane Ballantyne, a professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine at the University of Washington. She also noted that because the famous athletes have access to virtually any doctor they want, they often receive whatever treatment they want.

MULTIPLE PRESCRIPTIONS

There were few signs of trouble during Boogaard's first few seasons with the Wild, beginning in 2005, when he quickly established himself as a leading enforcer.

Documents show a marked shift after Oct. 16, 2008, when Boogaard lost a tooth during a fight with Florida's Wade Belak. While it is unknown what drugs Boogaard received in South Florida that night, he was given a prescription for hydrocodone (often known by the brand name Vicodin) several days later by a Wild team dentist.

That was the start of a 33-day stretch when Boogaard received at least 195 hydrocodone pills from six doctors, records show. He received pharmacy prescriptions for most, but records indicate that some were dispensed directly from doctors, including the Wild medical director Sheldon Burns, a family practitioner who is also medical director for the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves and a team physician for the Minnesota Vikings of the National Football League.

Burns and Dr. Dan Peterson, who share a practice in Edina, Minn., prescribed 110 more hydrocodone pills from Dec. 4 to Jan. 1, records show. In April, with his season over, Boogaard had operations a week apart on his nose and shoulder.

The painkiller prescriptions stopped during the 2009 summer offseason. By then, Boogaard had found illicit sources for pain pills from street dealers, according to his family and friends.

Peterson and Burns continued to prescribe Ambien — five times, 30 pills each, over about three months of the offseason. Ambien, with a recommended dosage of one 10-milligram pill a day, is considered a short-term solution to sleeping problems. The drug's warning label notes that it can impair coordination and exacerbate depression.

By fall, it was clear to those close to him that Boogaard had a drug problem, and the Wild caught on, too. During training camp in September, he was quietly placed in the league's substance-abuse program, assigned to a live-in rehabilitation clinic in Malibu, Calif.

Team doctors seem mostly to have stopped prescribing narcotic painkillers and sleeping pills during the 2009-10 season, after Boogaard's rehabilitation assignment. Most of Boogaard's prescriptions were for Trazodone, an antidepressant, and Tramadol, a different type of painkiller. Another prescription, in March, was for acetaminophen and codeine.

Highlighting the difficulty of treating a player subjected to continual pain without the use of powerful pain pills, Boogaard also received at least eight injections of Ketrolac Tromethamine, commonly known as Toradol. He often received acupuncture as a painkiller substitute, too.

INSIDE INFORMATION

The Rangers knew about Boogaard's addiction problems. Doug Risebrough, a senior official with the Rangers, had spent about a decade as the general manager of the Wild. He drafted Boogaard in 2001 and instructed coaches to turn him into a big-league enforcer.

When Boogaard was sent to rehabilitation in September 2009, he called Risebrough, who had been fired by the Wild months earlier. In June 2010, now working for the Rangers' front office, Risebrough met with Boogaard for a couple of hours, Len Boogaard said.

In October, Derek's brother Aaron told their father that Derek had been abusing pain pills with increasing regularity late in the summer. Derek demanded that Aaron mail to New York a large stash that Derek had left behind in Minneapolis. Aaron refused.

Len Boogaard sent an email to the Rangers on Oct. 13, 2010, requesting a conversation with Risebrough. Risebrough called the next day. Len Boogaard said he told Risebrough about Derek's renewed drug problem.

Two days later, Derek called his father and, according to Len Boogaard, complained that general manager Glen Sather had called him into his office, demanding the truth and threatening to trade him. Derek, apparently unaware that it was his father who had notified the Rangers, did not explain why Sather was upset, and Len Boogaard did not press him. The Rangers were on top of it, he thought.

Derek Boogaard continued to play and fight. And he increasingly received prescriptions for drugs that the Rangers knew he had previously abused.

On Oct. 21, 2010, a punch from Toronto's Colton Orr broke a three-tooth bridge in Boogaard's mouth. Three days later, Boogaard hurt his hand in a fight with Boston's Shawn Thornton.

On Oct. 26, a Rangers dentist, Dr. Joseph V. Esposito, citing an "emergency," prescribed 20 hydrocodone pills, the first of five prescriptions written over several weeks, totaling 64 pills.

It appears that decision might have come in consultation with the league's substance-abuse program. On the evening of that first hydrocodone prescription, Boogaard spoke briefly with Shaw and Cronin.

Outside experts noted the difficulty of treating a painkiller addict for ongoing pain. Cutting off all pain medications, they said, can lead to severe relapses in some patients.

On Nov. 16, two days after Boogaard had his nose broken by Edmonton's Steve McIntyre, Boogaard received another hydrocodone prescription from Esposito. Boogaard also received a prescription from another Rangers team doctor, Andrew Feldman, for 40 pills of Tramadol, a mild narcotic. It is unclear if Esposito and Feldman knew of each other's prescriptions.

''The doctor who prescribed Tramadol was probably thinking it's better than hydrocodone, but it's still addictive," said Ballantyne, the University of Washington pain expert.

Over the succeeding months, Boogaard continued to be prescribed medication — particularly Ambien. By several accounts, Boogaard drifted through wild mood swings and erratic behavior. Bored and lonely, he was sending and receiving more than 10,000 text messages a month in early 2011.

Among those he communicated with were Cronin and Shaw, hundreds of times. Boogaard was subjected to at least 19 drug tests during his season with the Rangers, most of which showed him testing positive — initially for antihistamines and decongestants, then Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication. By spring, Boogaard was testing positive for hydrocodone and other narcotic painkillers.

On Dec. 16, Ronald Weissman, a team doctor and cardiologist based in White Plains, prescribed 20 pills of Xanax. Records show he did it after consultation with Lewis, the substance-abuse program co-director.

Weissman's notes also say that Boogaard, on Dec. 14, complained of "chronic insomnia." Weissman wrote that he previously spoke with Lewis about Boogaard's past abuse of Ambien. He prescribed Restoril, another sleeping medication.

But early on Dec. 24, having just landed in Minneapolis for Christmas, Boogaard texted the Wild's Peterson. Later that day he had a prescription for 30 Zolpidem, the generic version of Ambien — one of at least four such prescriptions that Peterson wrote for Boogaard after Boogaard joined the Rangers.

On Jan. 6, 2011, Weissman prescribed Boogaard five pills of Ambien. While it is unknown what sort of guidance, if any, Weissman received from the substance-abuse directors, it was the first of nine Ambien prescriptions, the latter ones for 30 pills, that Weissman wrote for Boogaard over three months.

Later in January, another doctor, a neurologist keeping tabs of Boogaard's postconcussion symptoms, prescribed 30 pills of Zolpidem. Peterson, the Wild team doctor, prescribed 30 more on Feb. 2, when Boogaard was in Minnesota.

By March, friends and family said, Boogaard was spending thousands of dollars on pain pills from a man on Long Island. In early April, Boogaard flopped on the ice during a skating session and was confronted by an assistant. Within days, Boogaard was in California for another extended stay in substance-abuse rehabilitation, his second in about 18 months.

On May 12, granted a second long leave of absence from the rehabilitation facility, Boogaard returned to Minnesota. He went out with friends and his brother Aaron. A day later, Aaron and Ryan Boogaard, Derek's other younger brother, found Boogaard dead of an overdose on the bed of his Minneapolis apartment.

Len Boogaard has considered lawsuits. But he said that taking the NHL and those with ties to it to court could take a financial and time commitment that he could not afford. He cited the example of Steve Moore, a Colorado Avalanche player attacked on the ice by Vancouver's Todd Bertuzzi in 2004. A long-awaited trial is scheduled to begin later this year.

''It's not the money," Len Boogaard said. "But in eight years, how many more players are going to go through something like what Derek did?"