Hey guys,
I found that interesting old article from Men's health on schoolboy steroid abuse.
Fascinating and frightening.
Added a few paragraphs below:
It’s one thing for an adult male
to experiment with the off-label use of medication that can have such serious side effects, but steroid use in schoolboys brings a whole new set of problems. The manufacture of hormones are central in the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and even old hands in the steroids world are adamant that it’s not a good idea for children to take them.
Collins notes that it’s fairly easy to spot men who took steroids as boys: they’re big, but they tend to be short.
“In adolescents the growth plates fuse in different parts of the body at different ages,” he says. “These [growth plates] are what cause the bones to grow longer. So if you use steroids at an age before they are fused it can cause premature fusion and can actually stunt their growth. So you find, with a lot of kids who used steroids when they were young, they are quite big guys, but they’re short; they can’t get any taller because they fused their growth plates too soon.”
But the high stakes of schoolboy rugby, where your size determines whether or not you can make it onto the first team, into provincial trials, Craven Week, and hopefully the notebooks of Super Rugby talent scouts, has made the ballooning use of steroids among teenage rugby players almost inevitable. And while a lot of the pressure to perform comes from the schoolboys themselves, coaches, doctors and parents seem happy to get involved.
A promising Limpopo schoolboy rugby player, who is currently serving a two-year ban after testing positive for Dianabol at last year’s Craven Week, told his father that steroid use was tacitly encouraged at his school. “One of the teachers at school showed them a video that apparently claimed steroids are less hazardous to you than coffee and cigarettes,” the father recalls.
The boy attended a prominent boarding school and said that he had received the steroids in his hostel, from schoolmates who were also dealers. “At this very same Craven Week tournament where he was tested positive, I was sitting on the stand next to some boys talking about steroids,” his father says. “The one guy asked the other if he wasn’t worried that he’d be caught. He answered that he wasn’t, because of his doctor’s guidance, he’d never test positive.”
And although schools are reluctant to discuss the problem with outsiders, the overwhelming buy-in the South African Institute of Drug Free Sport (SAIDS) has received for its random drug testing in schools effectively amounts to a tacit admission that something is very wrong. According to SAIDS CEO Khalid Galant, the institute received so many requests from schools to be involved in the programme that its initial budget will not be sufficient; they’ll have to raise more funding to complete the programme.
A huge part of the problem with schoolboy steroid abuse is that they work so quickly – and so dramatically. “It was staggering how quickly he put on muscle,” says the mother of a matric boy who attended a prominent Joburg private school. “Within a matter of weeks he was noticeably bigger. And it’s not like he’s a small guy; all the men in our family are big men,” she says.
“We were very lucky though, to catch it early on. My son made the mistake of telling my daughter’s boyfriend about it, and that’s how I found out. I found a veterinary injectable drug and two lots of pills. The thing that worried me the most were the people who are selling the steroids. My son owed them money. In fact, that’s how I found out – he told a friend that he had to sell his X-Box to pay his dealer. I don’t know if these people sell drugs too.”
Dr Collins reckons the compulsion to use steroids for cosmetic reasons is far stronger among adolescents and young men than for sports use. “They see the picture on the front page of a publication like Men’s Health, of a person with this wonderful six-pack and a big chest, and they think that’s what normal is and that’s what they should look like. It’s the same with girls who want to look like Kate Moss, or whoever the latest model is, and become anorexic. School boy rugby players want to get bigger, but once you get to the professional rugby players, they get tested far too much. It’s just not worth it for them – if you weigh up the risk versus the potential gain.”
Especially in the teenage years, boys’ hormone levels are through the roof, so if you add more hormones to that, you get an exaggerated effect Collins says. “Boys do a lot of really stupid things – especially teenagers. You add steroids to that, they tend to do even more stupid things… they become more aggressive, more arrogant, and those effects combine to make them more confident. Now if you have a shy guy who suddenly becomes arrogant and aggressive, that might be good for him. But the danger is you don’t know how aggressive you will become and what you’re going to do when you’re that aggressive.
“Teenagers do a lot of stupid things with normal hormone levels. On steroids it’s like a worse teenager.”
Today I will do what I never thought possible!
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