Brad Fritsch has been suspended by the PGA Tour for three months after self reporting that he had taken DHEA, which is a banned substance on tour. Fritsch was slated to play mostly on the Web.com Tour in 2018, and he started a weight-loss program with his wife near the end of 2017. Without realizing it, Fritsch ingested DHEA as part of the program (via a spray called BioSom).
This substance is banned by the PGA Tour as a performance-enhancing drug and is apparently the same substance that got Vijay Singh into trouble a few years ago. Once Fritsch realized what had happened, he reported it and accepted the suspension. He recently popped on Facebook to give a detailed explanation that ended like this.
I'm just so upset with myself that I didn't think to question what was in the supplements. But I never did. And in the program rules, it stipulates that a self-report is the same as a positive test. I did know this when I sent the text to (head of the Tour's Anti-Doping program) Andy Levinson – like I said above, I believe in the program. I'm a proud member of the PGA Tour and I don't take that lightly.
If there is any silver lining, it's that I thankfully never played a competitive round during all of this. I don't feel great about this situation, but I've had over a month to kind of process my feelings about it. I'm in a good place (and I've lost 28 pounds, so I've got that going for me). I'm not sure I'd feel exactly the same way if I had competed against my peers while using a banned substance, even if it was out of ignorance. I just wish I had paid attention to the details. I'm embarrassed that I didn't pay attention to the details.
Fritsch has, somewhat ironically, argued in the past that drug suspensions should be made public by the PGA Tour to mitigate rumors about who did what. He has made a combined $2 million on the PGA Tour and Web.com Tour.
