DENVER — For some injured college football players, the post-operative pain-killing medication Toradol is a magic potion, giving them a chance to get back into a game faster and with more confidence.

As former University of Colorado and NFL lineman, Matt McChesney said, “A shot in your butt cheek before a game (and you) feel like frickin’ Superman when you walk on the field. Everything is numb. You feel great!”

But that euphoria doesn’t last. That’s not how the medication works. And when it wears off, McChesney says that’s when the dangerous cycle of need begins.

“After the game when you wake up, you feel like you got hit like a Mack truck because it hides everything. So what do you do? You go get another shot,” McChesney said.

For Colorado’s top amateur sports programs, Toradol is just one drug in a vast arsenal of numbing agents, narcotics, and other painkillers given to students-athletes in the training room.

FOX31 Denver investigative reporter Chris Halsne spent five months battling with 10 state universities to obtain accurate records documenting the kinds and quantity of medications available in the training room and on the sidelines during competition.

Watch his special report which aired Nov. 26, 2015 in the video clips above.