WHEN Brian Baldinger broke into the NFL in 1982 as an undrafted offensive lineman with the Dallas Cowboys, steroids were as prevalent in the league as six-shooters in the Wild West.

They weren't a dirty little secret back then. They were a tool of the trade. A significant percentage of the league's offensive and defensive linemen used them.

"I remember the first day of training camp, going into Player X's dorm room when the vets showed up," says Baldinger, who played 11 NFL seasons for the Cowboys, Eagles and Indianapolis Colts. "A brown bag was dumped out on the bed full of syringes and you name it. And you just kind of grabbed what you needed.

"It wasn't like it is now, with baseball players saying, 'Let's get the playing field even.' Back then, it was understood that X-amount of players, mostly linemen, that's what they did [use steroids]. It wasn't looked at as a competitive advantage."

That perspective would eventually change. As media scrutiny of steroid use in the league increased dramatically in the '80s and more and more "clean" players clamored for performance-enhancing drugs to be outlawed, the league, with the cooperation of the NFL Players Association, took action to eradicate them.

In 1987, the NFL became the first professional sports league to test its players for performance-enhancing drugs. In '89, it began suspending players based on annual testing in training camp. A year later, then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue gave the league's steroid policy real teeth when he implemented year-round random testing, as well as four-game suspensions for first-time offenders.

The percentage of steroid users dropped from 20.3 percent in the 1980s to 12.7 percent since then among retired players responding to a survey that appeared in the March edition of American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation.

"The NFL was ahead of the curve," Baldinger says. "It put a big dent in steroid use when they instituted year-round random testing. When you're testing once a year at the beginning of training camp, it's pretty easy for guys who are using to get around that. But when they started doing year-round testing, it made it a lot harder. I think it cleaned it up quite a bit."

Quite a bit, but not completely. Twenty years after the league began suspending players for using performance-enhancing drugs, players still are using them and many still are getting caught. According to league statistics, a total of 43 players have been suspended for violating the league's PED policy over the last 4 years.

Many of the players caught with their hand in the steroid jar have been fairly prominent, including San Diego Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman, New England Patriots safety Rodney Harrison, and defensive tackles Marcus Stroud (Buffalo Bills), Shaun Rogers (Cleveland Browns) and Kevin Williams and Pat Williams (Minnesota Vikings).

But there isn't the same public fascination with steroid use in football that there is in baseball. Nobody is writing books about Merriman's and Harrison's "tainted" careers the way they are about Roger Clemens' and Alex Rodriguez'. ESPN isn't asking Hall of Fame voters how three-time Pro Bowler Merriman's 2007 suspension will impact his chances of making it to Canton the way they've done with every baseball player who has been linked to steroids in the last 5 years.

"We get a fair amount of attention each time one of these suspensions occur," Adolpho Birch, the NFL's vice president of law and labor policy, who administers the league's PED program, told the Daily News in a recent interview. "But I think, from our perspective, we have been doing this for a long time. We were suspending players when people didn't care about it. I think if you look at it from a public perception, the one thing they understand is our policy is working and we're enforcing it as written.

"One problem that we don't have, there's not a question as to what was going on 10 years ago. There are not issues of, well, we don't really know what happened [back then]. We do know what happened. We had a policy and every person that has tested positive or been found to use performance-enhancing drugs has been suspended. We have a recognizable record of how we've dealt with the issue."

Baseball can't make the same claim. For years, it dealt with the steroids issue by not dealing with it, until it finally was shamed into doing something about it.

Baseball began survey-testing players for steroids in 2003, but didn't start suspending violators until 2005, 16 years after the NFL. Just 22 players have been suspended in the last 4 years, which is 21 fewer than in the NFL over the same period. But baseball's PED program doesn't include nearly as much random testing as the NFL's, making it considerably easier to beat.

Baseball's agreement with its players union, which fought steroid testing for years, permits a maximum of 375 offseason random tests over 3 years. Each player also is subject to at least one random test during the season, in addition to a mandatory test at the beginning of spring training.

By comparison, the NFL conducts several thousand random tests during the offseason, and can test a player as many as six times. During the season, the league randomly tests 10 players from every team each week. It also tests each player at the start of training camp.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell recently called the league's PED program "the gold standard in sports."

"I think we measure up as well or better [on steroid testing] than any particular organization that might be out there," Birch says.

That said, Birch isn't naive enough to think that the league is catching every cheater.