Five minutes. That’s all it takes to find 200mg of Trenbolone Enanthate online, sitting in a shopping basket for £46 plus delivery. No questions asked beyond creating an account.

Despite anabolic steroids being Class C drugs, with suppliers facing up to 14 years in prison, anyone can purchase them shockingly easily. And that ease of access might explain why steroid use in UK gyms has exploded, with more young people turning to Image and Performance Enhancing Drugs as a supposedly legitimate route to bigger muscles and better performance.

The website looks professional. Over 8,200 reviews. A respectable 4.9-star rating. Friendly pop-ups announcing that “someone in Huddersfield” just bought Testosterone-E. It’s all terrifyingly normal.

Normalised But Not Safe

Walk into any gym across the country, scroll through fitness social media, and you’ll see the same thing: impossibly large biceps, chiselled physiques, and the quiet understanding that hard work and protein shakes alone didn’t create many of these transformations.

Fitness culture has normalised performance enhancing drugs. What the impressive physiques don’t show are the devastating health consequences: liver and kidney failure, blood clots, high blood pressure, infertility, heart problems, strokes, and heart attacks.

Then there’s the injection risks. Damaged veins. Blood-borne viruses including HIV. Not to mention the psychological toll: addiction, depression, aggression, mood swings that can tear lives apart.

“I think a lot of people who use steroids in this way actually see it as part of a healthy lifestyle, a way of increasing their muscle mass and looking and feeling stronger and fitter,” says Dr Peter McCann, a consultant psychiatrist specialising in addictions and medical director at Castle Craig rehabilitation centre.

The Addiction Nobody Recognises

Here’s the problem: diagnostic criteria don’t classify steroid use in UK as an addiction, though experts have been calling for that to change.

“The need or tendency to keep using it even in the presence of harmful effects is really a hallmark of addiction,” McCann explains. “But people don’t see it as an addiction.”

Social media influencers promote these lifestyles. Gym culture reinforces them. Marketing packages it as wellness, not drug abuse. And because the law only criminalises selling steroids, not buying or using them, users don’t see themselves as doing anything wrong.

McCann has seen a rise in patients with IPED addictions at Castle Craig, though hard numbers are difficult to pin down. Many users lead seemingly normal, healthy lives. They don’t recognise their steroid use as problematic.

“It’s actually quite rare that we would have someone come in saying ‘I need help for my steroid use’,” he says. “If they see it as a problem at all, then it would very much be a secondary problem.”

Often, steroid use in UK patterns emerge only during treatment for other addictions, particularly cocaine. The steroids are discovered later, almost incidentally.

A Million Users and Counting

UK Anti-Doping published a status report in 2020 estimating that close to, and more likely over, one million people in the UK use steroids. Parliament has repeated that figure in the House of Commons, yet a worrying gap remains in accurate data showing the true scale of the crisis.

UKAD has described steroid use in UK as a “public health time bomb”.

Public Health Wales estimated about 350,000 male steroid users aged 16 to 64 visited needle exchanges across England, Scotland and Wales. But organisations consider that data both outdated and vastly underestimated.

When the Penny Dropped

In 2023, Cael Scott lodged a petition to Holyrood after doctors admitted his friend to hospital with a ruptured aorta from performance enhancing drugs.

“When I spoke to him, he was horrified at the severity of the issue, and was unaware of how bad the impacts could be having seen many people at his gym, and fitness influencers online, openly use IPEDs without apparent impact,” Scott’s petition stated.

“This is not an isolated incident. Every time I attend my gym, IPEDs are easily obtained, but information about them is not. Something must change.”

The petition was closed in April this year. Scott wasn’t surprised.

“It’s not very high up the political agenda because when you talk about drugs deaths, everyone thinks heroin because we see that,” he tells 1919 magazine. “So, introducing policies or doing an awareness campaign about steroids, most people will think it’s a very small proportion of people who go to gym who use them, and the main problem is they have ‘roid rage’ or acne. That’s the public perception.

“But actually, if you look over the course of 10 years, it will be about the same number of deaths from steroids as there will be from heroin because there are a lot more steroid users and it’s a long-term harm.”

The Long-Term Catastrophe

Data on long-term harm from steroid use in UK is scarce, but experts warn that significant health problems from prolonged use will surface soon.

UKAD’s 2020 report references a University of Copenhagen study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine tracking over 500 male steroid users for seven years. Mortality rates were three times higher amongst users compared to non-users. Hospital admission rates were 125% higher.

“There are very significant health risks,” McCann says. “It’s an injected drug so it has the risk of shared needles, or transmitting blood-borne viruses.

“Even if you’re using clean needles there’s still significant risks of injection sites, abscesses, infections. The products people are buying, they have no idea where they’ve come from. They can be impure.”

One study found microbes and bacteria in many of these products. The risk of infection is very real.

“Some of them can also have profound effects on cardiovascular system. There are lots of case reports of people developing heart failure, liver problems, you see increased rates of hepatitis and fatty liver and also some neurological cognitive effects as well. Quite a lot of people are reporting issues with memory, paying attention and other cognitive processes.”

The Vicious Cycle

The nature of IPEDs means long-term commitment. To keep seeing results, you need to keep taking them. The cycle, both literal and metaphorical, is vicious.

“Often, if you dug down into it, there would be signs of dysfunction and issues with moods, and I think people would be getting treatment for things like depression without anyone realising that it’s probably the steroid use that’s driving it,” McCann explains.

“But people can live very normal lives, that’s also one of the reasons it’s seen as kind of OK to do by a lot of young men.”

Social media pushes elaborate routines and pseudo-science around which combinations of steroids to use, alongside additional supplements with little scientific credibility. People portray themselves as experts. Young men believe them.

“They really effect your hormonal system in a way that could take a long time to reverse. Usually most of the changes would be reversable, but it can take months, sometimes years.”

Ignoring the Alarm

UKAD has made it clear that the use of IPEDs is a growing public health issue. But it’s one that’s largely going under the radar.

The soaring popularity of weight-loss drugs like Mounjaro and Wegovy, which can result in significant muscle mass loss, is thought to be driving even more people towards performance enhancing drugs to bulk up.

After spending vast amounts of time researching the issue during his petitions committee bid, Scott firmly believes there will soon come a day when this public health crisis finally manifests in the drug deaths data.

“This is a ticking time bomb and the ticking is getting louder and collectively we’re ignoring it,” he warns. “But we can’t ignore it forever.”

The question is: will we act before it explodes?

Source:dbrecoveryresources