Anabolic Steroids
Questions And Answers About Anabolic Steroids
What Are Anabolic Steroids?
Anabolic steroids are drugs derived from the male hormone testosterone. They promote muscle growth and increase lean body mass.
Although anabolic steroids have many approved medical uses, they are abused by some athletes and others seeking to improve performance and physical appearance. These nonmedical uses are illegal and carry many health hazards.
How Are They Used?
Anabolic steroids are taken as pills or injected. Steroid abusers may take hundreds of times more than the medically recommended dose.
Users often combine several different types of steroids to boost their effectiveness-a method called stacking.
In another method, called cycling, users take steroids for 6 to 12 weeks or more, stop for several weeks, and then start again.
How Many People Use Them?
In 1994, 1,084,000 Americans, or 0.5 percent of the adult population, said that they had used anabolic steroids, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.
In the 18 to 34 age group, about 1 percent had ever used steroids; for ages 35 and older, that figure went down to 0.2 percent. More men than women had used the drugs: 0.9 percent of men and 0.2 percent of women said they had ever taken steroids.
NIDA's Monitoring the Future study has tracked anabolic steroid use among middle school and high school students in the United States since 1989.
From 1989 to 1996, there was a slight, gradual decline in the number of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders who had ever used steroids or used them in the past year.
In 1996, 1.8 percent to 2.4 percent of these students had ever used steroids, and 0.9 percent to 1.5 percent had used them in the last year.
How Do People Get Them?
Under Federal law it is illegal to possess or distribute anabolic steroids for nonmedical uses. However, heavy demand has generated a black market with estimated sales of up to $400 million a year, according to a NIDA Research Report, Anabolic Steroids: A Threat to Body and Mind.
Anabolic steroids are manufactured legally or illegally outside the United States and smuggled in, usually through the mail; manufactured legally and diverted to the black market; or manufactured illegally in the United States. Many substances sold as anabolic steroids are diluted, contaminated, or simply fake.
What Are The Health Hazards?
Some of the main side effects of anabolic steroid abuse are trembling, severe acne, fluid retention, aching joints, high blood pressure, lower HDL (the good form of cholesterol), jaundice, and liver tumors.
Also, people who inject steroids with shared needles run the risk of contracting or transmitting hepatitis or HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Other Side Effects Include:
for men, shrunken testicles, reduced sperm count, impotence, infertility, baldness, development of breasts, difficulty or pain in urinating, and an enlarged prostate;
for women, growth of facial hair, changes in or cessation of the menstrual cycle, enlargement of the clitoris, deeper voice, and smaller breasts; and for adolescents, premature skeletal maturation and accelerated puberty leading to stunted growth.
Do They Really Work?
Athletes, as well as some coaches, trainers, and physicians, report significant increases in muscle mass, strength, and endurance from steroid use.
In acknowledgment of these effects, the International Olympic Committee has placed 20 anabolic steroids and related compounds on its list of banned drugs.
Who Takes Them And Why?
Today it is not only the college football player or the professional weightlifter or the marathon runner who may use anabolic steroids.
It may be an 18-year-old who loathes his skinny body. Or a 15-year old in a hurry to reach maturity.
Or a policeman who wants more muscle power on the job.
And the use of anabolic steroids is not confined to males. Professional and amateur female athletes-track and field competitors, swimmers, bodybuilders-feel the pressure to triumph, too.
Increasing numbers of adolescents are turning to steroids for cosmetic reasons. In a 1986 survey, as many as 45 percent of 200 high school users cited appearance as a primary reason for taking steroids.
Young people who use steroids defy easy categorizing. They come from cities and rural areas, from poor families and wealthy ones. They are of all races and nationalities.
The common link among them is the desire to look, perform and feel better at almost any cost. Users, especially younger people, are apt to ignore or deny warnings about health risks.
How Prevalent Is Use?
Surveys and anecdotal evidence indicate that the rate of nonmedical steroids use may be increasing. In 1990, a survey of high school seniors showed that nearly 3 percent-5 percent of males and 0.5 percent of females-reported using steroids at some time in their lives.
The same survey showed that steroids were used within the last year by nearly as many students as crack cocaine and by more students than the drug PCP.
Use among college females appears to have increased somewhat. A study of 11 universities in 1984 found that steroids users were reported in only one women's sport, swimming. It was used at a rate of 1 percent.
In a follow-up survey in 1988, 1 percent of women in track and field and basketball also reported taking steroids.
Use among adult or professional athletes has not been well documented, although anecdotal evidence clearly supports the suggestion that anabolic steroids have enjoyed popularity among football players, weightlifters, wrestlers, and track and field competitors, among others.
Anabolic Steroid Megadosing
Anabolic steroids are usually taken in pill form. Some that can not be absorbed orally are taken by injection. The normal prescribed daily dose for medical purposes usually averages between 1 and 5 milligrams.
Some athletes, on the other hand, may take up to hundreds of milligrams a day, far exceeding medically recommended dosages.
Operating on the erroneous more-is-better theory, some athletes indulge in a practice known as stacking. They take many types of steroids, sometimes in combination with other drugs such as stimulants, depressants, pain killers, anti-inflammatories, and other hormones.
Many users cycle, taking the drugs for 6 to 12 weeks or more, stopping for several weeks and then starting another cycle.
They may do this in the belief that by scheduling their steroids intake, they can manipulate test results and escape detection. It is not uncommon for athletes to cycle over a period of months or even years.
A Glossary Of Terms
Drug and steroids use in sports has spawned a glossary of its own:
Blending --- Mixing different drugs.
Bulking up --- Increasing muscle mass through steroids.
Cycling --- Taking multiple doses of steroids over a specified period of time, stopping for a time and starting again.
Doping --- Using drugs and other nonfood substances to improve athletic performance and prowess.
Ergogenic drugs --- Performance enhancing substances.
Megadosing --- Taking massive amounts of steroids.
Plateauing --- When a drug becomes ineffective at a certain level.
Roid rage --- Uncontrolled outbursts of anger, frustration or combativeness that may result from using anabolic steroids.
Shotgunning --- Taking steroids on a hit-or-miss basis.
Stacking --- Using a combination of anabolic steroids, often in combination with other drugs.
Tapering --- Slowly decreasing steroids intake.
Medical Uses
Steroids are drugs derived from hormones. Anabolic steroids comprise one group of these hormonal drugs. In certain cases, some may have therapeutic value.
The U. S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of selected anabolic steroids for treating specific types of anemia, some breast cancers, osteoporosis, endometriosus, and hereditary angioedema, a rare disease involving swelling of some parts of the body.
Some medical specialists believe that anabolic steroids can improve the appetite and improve healing after surgery, but the FDA has withdrawn approval for such uses since the claims are vague and largely unsubstantiated.
Sports Organizations Outlawing Anabolic Steroids
The International Olympics Committee banned steroids use by all athletes in its member associations in 1975. Since then most major amateur and professional organizations have put the drugs on their list of banned substances.
They include:
National Football League International Amateur
Athletic Federation
National Collegiate Athletic Association International
Federation of Body Builders
Special Dangers To Adolescents
Anabolic steroids can halt growth prematurely in adolescents. Because even small doses can irreversibly affect growth, steroids are rarely prescribed for children and young adults, and only for the severely ill.
The Office of the Inspector General in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has gathered anecdotal evidence that pre teens and teens taking steroids may be at risk for developing a dependence on them drugs and on other substances as well.
Supply And Demand: The Black Market
Many users maintain their habit with anabolic steroids acquired through a highly organized black market handling up to $400 million worth of the drugs a year.
Until recently most underground steroids were legitimately manufactured pharmaceuticals that were diverted to the black market through theft and fraudulent prescriptions. More effective law enforcement coupled with greater demand forced black marketers to seek new sources.
Now black-market anabolic steroids are either made overseas and smuggled into the United States or are produced in clandestine laboratories in this country. These counterfeit drugs may present greater health risks because they are manufactured without controls and thus may be impure, mislabeled, or simply bogus.
Sales are made in gyms, health dubs, on campuses, and through the mail. Users report that suppliers may be drug dealers or they may be trainers, physicians, pharmacists, or friends.
It's not hard for users to buy the drugs or to learn how to use them. Many of them rely on an underground manual, a bible on steroids that circulates around the country.
Testing
The major national and international sports associations enforce their ban against anabolic steroids by periodic testing. Testing, however, is controversial.
Some observers say the tests are not reliable, and even the International Olympic Committees tests, considered to be the most accurate, have been challenged.
Athletes can manipulate results with masking agents to prevent detection, or they can take anabolic steroids that have calculable detection periods.
Despite the problems, testing remains an important way of monitoring and controlling the abuse of steroids among athletes. Efforts are underway to make testing more accurate.
Legislation
Both Federal and State governments have enacted laws and regulations to control anabolic steroids abuse.
In 1988, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, making the distribution or possession of anabolic steroids for nonmedical reasons a Federal offense. Distribution to minors is a prison offense.
In 1990, Congress toughened the laws, passing legislation that classifies anabolic steroids as a controlled substance. The new law also increases penalties for steroids use and trafficking.
To halt diversion of anabolic steroids onto the black market, the law imposes strict production and record keeping regulations on pharmaceutical firms.
Books Anabolic Steroids:
Ultimate Research Guide
If you want to learn more about anabolic steroids, or use them in as safe a manner as possible, this book is easy to understand. This is not a book written by a doctors who have never used roids. The author is a user himself.
Anabolic Steroids
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