wonder myths facts
- WORDSSteven Kotler
A Political Potion
Discovering the propoganda behind this drug of wonder
Imagine, if you will, a drug of wonder. A potion so potent it can reverse the hands of time, bring terminally ill patients back from the brink, lop months from the recovery time for broken bones, restore eyesight, remove chronic pain, grow muscles, boost energy, increase stamina, increase sex appeal, and make the sad happy again. It’s a miracle, really. But like all other miracles, this one can scare some folks. After all, we can’t have healthy, youthful, sexually robust folks running around in “safe” society--so this drug becomes cause for concern. It becomes demonized. Scandals erupt in its wake. Governing bodies are organized against it. Pundits prevaricate about its many ill effects. Politicians raise millions by stumping against it. A black market develops. Thousands go to jail. Thousands more die. Wars are fought over it. The President ranks it second to terrorism as the most dangerous issue facing the country. Now imagine that all of this is true--because, out here in the real world, there’s another name for this drug: steroids.
Perhaps, you think, that’s not possible. After all, haven’t we just spent the past five years being beaten over the head with all forms of chatter, from congressional hearings to corporate debate. And while we may not yet have an effective solution to this menace, we are certainly fluent in the facts. Unfortunately, for everyone involved, nothing could be farther from the truth.
To understand the truth, it is first necessary to know a bit of history. The steroid saga dates back to the middle 1700s, but didn’t really get up to speed until 1889, when British neurologist Charles Edward Brown-Sequard published a paper about the benefits he obtained by injecting himself with a mysterious substance extracted from the testes of dogs, sheep, and guinea pigs. He reported increased strength, energy, and a feeling of well-being. Sequard-Brown was a renowned scientist. He taught at Harvard. He was the first person to decode the physiology of the spinal column and spent the later years of his life ruining his reputation by touting the rejuvenating potential of this mystery substance.
The substance is, of course, the hormone testosterone, an anabolic and androgenic steroid--anabolic because it builds tissue, androgenic because it controls the development of male sexual characteristics. Despite the efforts of Brown-Sequard, testosterone remained a mystery substance until the early 1930s, when Dutch pharmacologist Ernst Laqueur managed to isolate 10 milligrams of crystalline testosterone from 100 kilograms of bull testicles. Once scientists could tease apart its chemical structure, we were off to the races--quite literally.
Within a few years, a group of Swedish athletes were hopped up on Rejuven, a performance enhancer that worked its magic with small amounts of testosterone. At the 1936 Olympics, there were rumors that German competitors--fueled by Hitler’s dreams of Aryan perfection--were taking even larger doses. By the ‘40s, word of these effects had spread throughout Europe and America. In 1945, Paul de Kruif, one of America’s most famous science writers, published The Male Hormone, describing testosterone as a medical marvel capable of increasing vigor, extending life, and providing sexual regeneration.
About this, he isn’t wrong. In fact, as Mark Gordon, a Los Angeles-based anti-aging doctor with close to 4,000 patients, says: “Steroids are about as close to a wonder drug as just about any other substance we know of. Look at the diseases they treat: Lyme, diabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome, patients with MS on steroids exhibit no symptoms, full turnaround in AIDS wasting syndrome. I know athletes whose injuries should take 9 months to heal after surgery--with steroids that shrinks to 2 months. Do you wear glasses? Do you know there’s a muscle surrounding the eye that wears out as we age and steroids can keep it healthy? I mean, the list just goes on and on.”
As far as the adverse effects we’ve been hearing so much about--those too are suspect. Mauro Di Pasquale, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject and the man who designed the drug-testing program for everyone from NASCAR to the World Wrestling Federation, says: “These drugs are bad for teenagers; there’s no way around that. But as used by most people, including athletes, the adverse effects appear to be minimal. Steroids do not cause cancer. They don’t cause kidney failure. The liver problems once attributed to oral steroids were actually caused by the coating needed for the steroid to pass through the gut. That coating has since been removed and the liver problems have vanished. Truthfully, there have been thousands of steroid studies and about a hundred of them point out bad side effects. But if you look at those studies carefully, there’s no one-to-one correlation, and a one-to-one correlation is the hallmark of good science.”
As emergency room doctors across the country have testified, (black market steroids) are far more dangerous than anything that normal steroids could produce
None of this information has been well publicized because other events have stolen the spotlight. Those events date back to the 1960s, when people began to notice that certain Eastern-bloc, female athletes were throwing that shot put a little too far for comfort. By 1975, the Olympic Committee had banned steroids and, within ten years, most other major sports had followed suit. But these bans were seen as only partial solutions. At stake was the very integrity of sport--the uneven playing field we’ve heard so much about.
And while this is certainly true, what is also true is that sports is big business. Very big. The average NHL team is valued at $150 million, the average NFL team at $530 million. And these numbers don’t include downstream revenues that include everything from the salaries of local-cable, sports broadcasters to the sales of basketball shoes--and it was this whole industry that was seen at risk because of steroids.
So, in 1977, the organized sports establishment decided they would solve the whole problem by educating the athletes. “A strategy was devised,” says Rick Collins, America’s foremost legal expert on steroids. “They wanted to convince competitive athletes that anabolic steroids don’t build muscles, but they needed a credible source for their message, and they picked the American College of Sports Medicine.”
The College took to issuing proclamations: “Steroids have no effect on lean muscle mass; the effects athletes are seeing are water retention; the effects athletes are seeing are the placebo effect.” These claims were backed up by some seriously flawed studies, and those flaws became so apparent, by 1984, a different approach was tried. Tell the athletes that steroids are bad for them. Make them sound truly horrible. Testicular atrophy, ‘roid rage, acne, cancer, liver problems, heart problems, kidney problems. The media picked up the story and ran with it and--never mind that most of their information was just flat-out wrong--are still running with it today.
Then another fact came to light. High school kids were using steroids. Since nothing fills war chests faster than a good “Save the Children” campaign, Congress couldn’t resist. Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which made trafficking in such hormones illegal. A variety of subcommittees were formed to hear testimony about whether or not steroids should become a controlled substance. Dr. Charles Yesalis, who was then the foremost medical expert on the subject, was emphatic: banning steroids was a very bad idea. His feelings were echoed by the American Medical Association, Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Agency, and the Drug Enforcement Agency--the four regulatory agencies who are supposed to control such decisions. But it didn’t matter. The sport industry must be saved. The results were the 1990 Steroid Control Act: a law that would send thousands to jail for the crime of muscle building.
But what of those thousands? As Rick Collins says, “I have yet to see a single high-profile athlete imprisoned, despite the 16 years since these drugs have been illegal. The vast majority of those arrests are not even the teenagers we’re so worried about. That majority comes from the same group that comprises most of the users: adult males, ages 25-45, who are gainfully employed, health-conscious, and using steroids for completely cosmetic reasons. But the drug war has lost its luster, and steroids are a way to keep it going.”
And things didn’t end with the Control Act of 1990. Thanks to the “Barry Bonds Show,” Congress updated the 1990 Act with another version in 2004. Some confusing language from the first bill was replaced by some less confusing language in the second bill but, as nearly every expert in the field will tell you, the effects on athletics--the declared target of these laws--will be nil. That’s because drug testing requires one-for-one matching. Currently, we can detect around 40 performance-enhancing substances. But there are an infinite number of potential steroids. Growth hormone, for example, is one of the most popular chemicals and remains undetectable. Making matters worse, the tests used produce all kinds of false positives. “Most of these tests are invalidated,” says Dr. Gordon, “because these are professional athletes we’re talking about. By nature of their activity, their hormonal levels will be off anyway. These tests were designed for normal people. You’ve got to face the facts: professional athletes aren’t normal people.”
But all of this is really beside the point. “If you really wanted to clean up sports,” says di Pasquale, “you would need to take hormonal profiles as athletes are entering the profession. You would need the kind of randomized testing that would allow someone to show up at your house in the middle of the night (in the middle of the off-season) to take blood samples. If baseball was serious about cleaning itself up, they would have to spend 50 times the amount they’re actually spending.”
While the Steroid Control Act didn’t manage to halt the flow of drugs--surveys show that what was a $300-million-dollar market in 1990 has become a $400-million-dollar market today--it halted the flow of domestic drugs. “The Control Act has effectively become a foreign-aid policy, helping other nations supplement their export revenues by shipping products to America that we’re not allowed to make,” writes Rick Collins in his book, Legal Muscle.
But the real losers are the general public. So effective was the anti-steroid hysteria of the ‘90s that, despite the fact these drugs have proven to add years to the lives of HIV-positive people, their demonization scared the medical establishment. As L.A.-based nutrition expert-turned-steroid researcher Michael Mooney puts it: “They scared the shit out of a lot of good doctors, and they spread a lot of bullshit about steroids that bad doctors believed as truth. It almost goes without saying that if things had gone differently, there’d be a few million HIV-positive people who’d still be alive today.”
And those fear tactics have only grown stronger as of late. So effective is the hype today, there are millions of people with all sorts of steroid-treatable diseases who will never hear about these treatments. In fact, the vast majority of baby boomers will die without knowing that these hormones could have both added years to their lives and made those years vibrant and livable, rather than just endurable. That is the thing about a wonder drug--it really makes you wonder. 7