Show #2680
DIALOGUE
The Evolution of Anabolic Steroid Laws
with guest, Anthony Roberts

Steroid laws. Where did they come? Why do we even have them today?

[00:02:52] Carl Lanore: 
Always good to have you on the show Anthony. Before we get into this, I have to read something. Natalie Kopitzke who helps me produce the show, sent me this write-up. I've never talked about your pedigree. When I read it myself, I thought, I'm doing Anthony, such a disservice by not saying this.

“Anthony Roberts holds bachelor's degrees in both English and philosophy with a minor in women's studies. He is the author of three books on the subject of performance enhancing drugs. He is a staff writer at Muscle Eolution Magazine, a member in good standing of the Society of Professional Journalists. Anthony is also a certified trainer and coach and professional member of the National Strength and Conditioning Association. At the young age of 17, he won silver medal in martial arts at the garden state games, black belt division then began playing rugby at the age of 18. After four years of captaining, Seton Hall's team, and two appearances in the collegiate national all-star games, Anthony moved to New Zealand to play for a club in the first division. Upon his return, he continued playing for first division men's clubs while spending a season as an assistant coach at a federal military college followed by three seasons as head coach leading to a national ranking of 13 and two first division championships. Anthony has worked in the dietary supplement world for the past decade, where he has introduced new ingredients to the market, formulated numerous products, sourced and sold raw materials and provided consulting services to companies that range in size from small startups to some of the largest in the industry.

You have been a vocal opponent of anabolic steroid laws forever. You've talked and written extensively about this. Recently you wrote an article that appears in Muscular Development.com “Anabolic Steroid Pioneer Dr. Michael Dullnig and the Evolution of Steroid Laws.(shrnetwork.biz/AASLAWS)

The article is so well-written that I guarantee that if you read the first paragraph, you won't be able to stop reading. Tell us how the story starts.

[00:07:00] Anthony Roberts: 
Sure. I'm going to tell it exactly in the way it was told to me. Dr. Dullnig was a doctor at the time. I believe he was living in LA. He invited all of his friends over and for a party. He had had chosen this day specifically.

He was in the midst of a huge long-term project that involved the use of anabolic steroids in HIV and AIDS related wasting. As the party went on, he greeted everyone, they talked, he was excited about his work and at the end of the party, he went upstairs and died by suicide. He laced his favorite yogurt and he just laid down and died.

He had contracted HIV, which wrecks your immune system, Most people that pass away from AIDS or HIV contract pneumonia. He happened to get an opportunistic infection that caused a skin rash -intense burning and itchiness and eventually blindness.  Just consider that, he got to have a party. That's kind of cool, in agony and blind.

Carl Lanore
In many of your articles, you gave very sound valuable information before anyone in the industry. It’s interesting that early on you also said the DEA doesn't want to be bothered with steroid laws. Talk about that a little bit.

Anthony Roberts:
The DEA doesn't, because if you bust the biggest steroid dealer in the Country you're talking about less than $10 million, in terms of what kind of assets you can seize.  Operation raw deal was the largest steroid bust of all time. I think they had 143 indictments and $6 million in cash seized. If you're the DEA and you bust 146 cocaine dealers, then you're going to have triple, quadruple that.

[00:17:30]
The government started going after steroids back in the eighties, when Ben Johnson got caught doping at the Olympics. This Canadian guy was cheating and we weren't. It was a layup for politicians to get involved and say, all right, we're going to make this illegal.

They heard about DBall as everyone has and they atried to make it schedule one. They paraded some DEA guys out to a hearing and the DEA guy said, listen, there's criteria to schedule a drug and this meets literally none of them. So the senators at the time said, well, how about schedule five? The DEA guy basically said, no, I said none of them.

They had a second set of hearings. The DEA is empowered with the ability to schedule, but since anabolic steroids don't meet any of the criteria, this DEA guy said to Congress, you're going to have to schedule them legislatively because they don't fit.  So Congress did. that. It was right after Ben Johnson while people were up in arms.

[00:20:07] Carl Lanore: 
Are there any other instances where professional sports dictated medical procedure and intervention?

Anthony Roberts:
Besides steroids? Patrick Arnold and Andrew in 2003, we were in that sort of home run era of baseball. They had hearings and they started going after what we today call prohormones and they called them precursors, which is not technically correct.  Neither is prohormone, but they went after them and they came out with a new list and new criteria. And funny enough, in the new criteria the compound didn't have to be anabolic…The scientific conclusion is these aren't anabolic so it’s not cheating.

 [00:22:52] Anthony Roberts:
The drug, the substance, whatever it is, doesn't care why you're using it. It has the same effect. The drug doesn't make a moral distinction and say, this person is transgender so I'm not going to cause elevated LDL cholesterol because the person's motivation is different. You get the same side effects.  Obviously dosing and compounds are going to matter but the moral side of it doesn't make sense to me. I don't think it should be Congress's place or anyone's place to tell us what we can put in our body or the motivation for putting it in our bodies.

Carl Lanore:
I agree with you hundred percent. There are a lot of things that the government shouldn't have their hands in, and going back to professional sports, there are organizations that have jurisdiction, they make the rules that apply to professional athletes and Olympic athletes. It should stop there.

Carl Lanore:
In the end, it's your own business. Right now a woman can go out and subject herself to very risky plastic surgery and have butt implants, boob implants have all sorts of body fat ripped off of her and die on that table. It happens all the time and there's no legislators saying, Hey, we need to put a stop to this elective plastic surgery, because people are putting themselves at risk.  Performance and appearance enhancing drugs are what they are now because there are a lot of people on steroids who aren't competing at anything, but they want to look strong.They want to look big and muscular. They want to feel good.

[00:27:59] Anthony Roberts:
That’s what it comes down to for me which is why I focused on Dr. Dullnig. There’s e no better subject, right? This is a guy who is doing research into anabolic steroids, trying to prolong lives and government was coming along and saying we're going to make these illegal, we're going to make it so doctors can't prescribe them to people are going to die without them.

Carl Lanore:
One of the things we have to do besides refinement of the process of election laws and so on is we have to do away with something that few people know about. It's called sovereign immunity. It's a law. If an acting official of a state or  federal government does something dishonestly, or for the wrong reasons or your decisions hurt people, sovereign immunity protects them.  We need to do away with sovereign immunity. We'd actually have the ability to take politicians to task, not for everything they do, but for the things that count, like all the people who died of AIDs, that would have had prolonged lives, had they had legal access to these drugs.

Anthony Roberts
That's exactly the point. This isn't an artificial hypothetical. Literally they immediately arrested a doctor that was working with with HIV positive men in Los Angeles.  This happened and people died and for the president to be one of the guys to catalyze that… I hope he did have a change of heart. That's what I'll say. I hope he did have a change of heart.

Carl Lanore:
Do you think that the steroid laws will ever be revisited or they're demonized now and they'll never be unchained from that early decision?

Anthony Roberts:
Dr. Dullnig was corresponding with various steroid manufacturers and he was very smart and they didn't want to mess with him. He knew what he was talking about. When he said we need to do this, and he had the supportive of some people in the community, they said, all right.

Carl Lanore
Nelson Virgil has been on the show a couple of times and he was a prominent figure in that period of time.

[00:36:54] Anthony Roberts: 
I actually interviewed him pretty extensively. An interesting thing about this article is I actually wrote it like two or three years ago and the magazine that I was working with went under. This article was in limbo for years, but Nelson is one of the guys who helped me a ton with the article.

Carl Lanore:
He’s been a big advocate. Also. I think he was involved with some of the organizations that were trying to help men with HIV get access.

Anthony Roberts:
You shouldn't have to smuggle drugs across the border to live, and the government shouldn't put you in that position, and to be honest, if you feel like you need hormones or you want hormones for some other reason, then take them. That's not my business and I don't want the government in that business. I don't want a government in the business of deciding things that should be a personal choice at all.

With this article, I want people to have an idea of where these laws come from. I mean, obviously you can't write that article and you can't read that article without having a degree of admiration for guys like Michael Dullnig, but I want them to understand that these laws don't come from a place of protecting. Look at these hearings. I have a quote from the hearings in there, The DEA, the FDA, the DOJ, the AMA, they all oppose steroid becoming schedule three drugs, all of them.

Anthony is such an amazing writer that he can take very mundane topics and make them pull you in with fascinating stories and tangential jump off points.

Anabolic Steroid Pioneer Dr. Michael Dullnig and the Evolution of Steroid Laws.
shrnetwork.biz/AASLAWS