Anabolic Steroids

Behind the Bulk: Craig's Story

By Cate Baily
Adapted from Heads Up: Real News About Drugs and Your Body, Scholastic, Inc., 2003. (While the following story is real, to insure anonymity the photo is of a model and is not of the article's subject).

Adapted from Heads Up: Real News About Drugs and Your Body, Scholastic, Inc., 2003. (While the following story is real, to insure anonymity the photo is of a model and is not of the article's subject).

Every time he passed a mirror, Craig flexed his muscles. He wanted to look "insanely big-like an action figure."

"When I walked into a room, I wanted heads to turn," he says. People did notice Craig's 225-pound, 5-foot 9-inch frame. But what they didn't see was the physical damage and psychological turmoil going on inside. The story behind the bulk was five years of steroid abuse and a struggle with muscle dysmorphia, a condition in which a person has a distorted image of his or her body. Men with this condition think that they look small and weak, even if they are large and muscular.

Illegal and Grim

It all started when Craig was 18. Before a trip to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, he was feeling overweight. He wanted to look good with his shirt off, so he resolved to get fit. A student at Bristol Community College, in Fall River, Massachusetts, he started going to a nearby gym. Running on the treadmill, he slimmed down fast, losing 20 pounds in a month.

But lean wasn't Craig's ideal. "My whole priority was, I wanted people to say, That guy's huge."

He lifted weights and experimented with steroidal supplements, also called dietary supplements. These drugs promise to build muscles. Despite potential risks and unclear effectiveness, they can be bought legally over the counter at many stores.

But what Craig was looking for couldn't be bought in a store. So he turned to anabolic steroids, drugs derived from the male sex hormone testosterone.

Under a doctor's supervision, anabolic steroids have some legitimate medical uses, as do corticosteroids, a different type of steroid used to reduce swelling. But to use steroids as Craig did, for muscle-building in a healthy body, is illegal. This didn't stop him. Neither did the many grim potential side effects.

Craig thought he knew exactly what he was getting into. And like 4 percent of high school seniors (according to a 2002 NIDA-funded study) and an estimated hundreds of thousands of adults, he took steroids anyway.

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