Steelers team physician Dr. Anthony Yates is prominently mentioned in a lawsuit brought by former NFL players who are suing the league’s 32 teams and alleging they ignored federal drug laws and prescribed an inordinate amount of addictive painkillers.

According to court documents obtained and published by the Washington Post and Deadspin.com, Yates was a member of a league-funded task force to study the use of Toradol, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug that is popular in the league. Yates testified he witnessed players lining up for the “T-Train” - injections of Toradol before games - something that had been occurring with the Steelers for at least the previous 15 years.

Yates also testified that a majority of NFL teams as of 2010 violated federal laws and regulations by allowing trainers to control and handle prescription medications and controlled substances when they should not have.

In a 2010 email exchange with Dr. Elliot Pellman, formerly the league’s medical director, and other team doctors, Yates seemed concerned about the dispensation of controlled substances in regard to investigations by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Yet Yates and other Steelers physicians were dispensing painkillers at a rate well above the league average. In 2012, the Steelers gave their players 7,442 doses of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs while the league average was 5,777, according to a March 2013 internal document from Lawrence Brown, the NFL-employed medical adviser who oversees its drug issues. They ranked 10th in the league in dispensing NSAIDs.

It isn’t clear how many players received the drugs, but if a 53-man roster is used as a baseline, that’s 140 doses per player.

The Steelers also distributed 2,123 doses of other controlled substances. They ranked 14th in dispensing those drugs.

A Steelers spokesman said team president Art Rooney II is not commenting on the lawsuit.