Written by:
Bob Egelko
April 10, 2008
An Orange County physician who was named in a Major League Baseball investigation as a source of steroids to ballplayers Troy Glaus and Scott Schoenweis has been indicted by a federal grand jury in San Jose on multiple drug charges, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday.
Ramon Scruggs, 60, operator of the New Hope Health Center in Costa Mesa, was charged with conspiring to distribute anabolic steroids, human growth hormones and other prescription drugs to professional baseball players, law enforcement officers and others between September 2000 and May 2003. He was also accused of conspiring with assistants to smuggle human growth hormone from China to San Francisco.
The indictment was dated March 6 and was unsealed Wednesday.
A report by former Sen. George Mitchell, commissioned by baseball officials and released in December, identified Scruggs as the doctor who supplied steroids to Glaus and prescribed the drugs to Schoenweis.
Glaus is now an infielder with the St. Louis Cardinals and Schoenweis pitches for the New York Mets. Neither has been charged with wrongdoing or disciplined by the major leagues.
The indictment against Scruggs did not name any players. It said ballplayers' agents referred their clients to Scruggs, his consultant Allan Danto and office manager Heidi MacPherson "for the purpose of obtaining anabolic steroids and other drugs which those individuals knew to be banned by Major League Baseball and therefore unavailable to the players through lawful medical channels."
Scruggs prescribed human growth hormones without any legitimate medical diagnosis of his clients' need for the substance, and often without conducting a medical examination, the indictment said.
The prescriptions were forwarded to pharmacies in California and elsewhere and delivered to Scruggs' clients throughout the United States, the indictment said. He was also charged with misbranding drugs and with money-laundering.
Scruggs' lawyer, Carlos Negrete, said his client denies wrongdoing.
"It seems to be a witch hunt guided by publicity and particularly arising from the (Major League Baseball Players) Association's failure to police its own," Negrete said. "His position is that all of his activities during this period of time were lawful and within the scope of proper medical practice."
He said he could not identify or discuss Scruggs' patients because of doctor-patient confidentiality.
The California Medical Board placed Scruggs on probation for 35 months in March 2007. The New York Times reported that the board fined him $4,800 and prohibited him from prescribing drugs over the Internet after finding that he had issued more than 6,000 prescriptions of dangerous drugs or controlled substances without a good-faith examination of the patients.
The newspaper also quoted him as saying, in a July 2000 interview on the Web site anabolicextreme.com, that he was taking human growth hormone himself.
"I don't like taking 22- or 23-year-olds and putting them on steroids; it makes me nervous," Scruggs was quoted as saying. "Yet I'd rather have them come to me and manage their steroid use than have them do it on their own."
