One thing the ongoing investigation by the Albany district attorney’s office and other law enforcement agencies into Internet steroid and growth hormone distribution has done is focus attention on professional athletes using HGH the way nothing else has. It speaks to the point former Penn State professor Charles Yesalis has been making for years, that testing won't dent performance-enhancing drugs, but law enforcement might. At the very least, it allows the media to hit the issue using real names.

Stories about the effects and dangers of HGH first appeared in the News in 2002, and more appeared nationally in 2005 after Congressional hearings highlighted the limits of testing when it came to HGH. But the exposure was quick and limited. When Jason Giambi kinda sorta admitted taking HGH, and subsequently developed a pituitary tumor that may have been accelerated by its use, the issue still didn’t catch fire. But now that the names of professional ballplayers are leaking, and Gary Matthews Jr., Jerry Hairston Jr., David Bell, Darren Holmes, John Rocker and others are demonstrating how many people are connected to just one Mobile, Ala., pharmacy, the questions again emerge: How many more have gotten drugs from other pharmacies, from private physicians, from friends, from other illegitimate Internet sources, from “longevity” clinics?

As we wait for the archives to be populated on the brand new News Web site, here are a few PDFs (and one recent link) of stories we’ve written about human growth hormone over the past five years:

Baseball Gets All Juiced Up; Locker rooms resemble pharmacopia [pdf 1 & 2]

Casting 'Net on HGH Jocks