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Scotland's new needle cultureDate: 17.03.2007
Posted by: Anabolic Info Team United Kingdom
IT'S LEGAL, it's undetectable and it's claimed it allows sportsmen and women to increase their muscle bulk by 30lbs in just two months while also drastically cutting down their body fat. Not only that, but it's believed to repair the injured body in a fraction of the time of the natural healing process, is increasingly cheap and may even make you look younger. No wonder human growth hormone (HGH) has become the drug of choice for both club and elite competitors.
Until now health professionals and sports administrators have only been able to guess at the scale of its use. This week, however, Scotland on Sunday has obtained evidence that reveals the shockingly widespread use of a drug which gives users a vital extra edge, but which can also lead to an early grave.
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The key to uncovering the inexorable spread of HGH is a scheme run as part of the Needle Exchange Schemes, which were originally set up to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS by swapping drug users' old needles for new ones. Health workers were surprised to find an increasing number of clients were anabolic steroid users.
In many parts of the UK, the schemes were recently extended to include steroid users, who had traditionally been unwilling to rub shoulders with addicts, which in turn led to special needle exchange clinics being set up at gyms around the country. As with the existing needle exchange programme, data relating to the type and amount of needles exchanged has been collated and analysed. The results have staggered health professionals and sports administrators.
Of the total number of needles exchanged in the UK last year, around 50% were used to inject heroin or other illegal drugs, but the remaining 50% - the longer thicker needles able to penetrate deep into muscle groups - were used to inject steroids. In some inner-city pockets, that figure was as high as 70%. Clinic reports indicate that many users are now turning to the use of human growth hormone. Informed estimates suggest that as many as 21% have turned to HGH alongside the more traditional performance-enhancing drugs. In the Greater Glasgow area alone, over one million needles are handed out each year under the scheme, with a return rate of around 80%, which suggests a huge level of HGH and steroid use.
HUMAN growth hormone is a naturally-occuring substance produced by the pituitary gland which stimulates the growth of bones, muscles and tissue and was originally used in the 1960s to treat children suffering from dwarfism. These days it is manufactured synthetically for use with patients who suffer from a growth hormone deficiency. Although a banned substance for all forms of competitive sport, there is currently no reliable test for its presence, so no effective deterrent to its use. Although its possession and use is illegal in many countries, in the UK it is only illegal to possess with the intent to supply; otherwise the only bar to obtaining it is the need for a prescription. And that's not much of an obstacle, as its ready availability in gyms throughout the country will testify.
Last year, the worldwide HGH industry was worth over L1bn, a fast-expanding market that has been swollen by the growing use of the drug as an anti-ageing panacea. When Sylvester Stallone was arrested going through Australian customs with 48 vials of HGH last week, the 63-year-old Rocky star was less concerned with sculpting his famously ribbed body than holding back the ravages of time. In New York and Hollywood the use of HGH, which is promoted as preventing wrinkles, is rife. No wonder it is known as the "Peter Pan" drug.
As the drug has grown in popularity, prices have plummeted. In 2000 a single vial of HGH cost L30 - today it costs L5. Users, who are usually those in strength events, such as sprinting or bodybuilding, inject it subcutaneously or directly into the specific muscle they want to develop, or into any damaged tissue that they want to heal urgently. This would usually take several vials a day.
It is now in use at all levels. Imagine, for instance, that you are a top football club which has a player who has damaged a muscle and may miss a cup final, league run-in or Champions League campaign. Your medical team know that HGH allows your player to be fit to play in a third of the time of conventional medicine - what do you do? As the steroid scandal at Juventus in 2001 shows, at many clubs that question would be a rhetorical one.
Using HGH isn't without risk though. Side-effects include abnormal growth in extremities such as feet, hands and jaws, which is why Ben Johnson's former coach, Charlie Francis, asked why, at the Tokyo World Championships in 1991, seven of the eleven athletes from Carl Lewis' elite sprint club, the Santa Monica Track Club, wore teeth braces, compared to around 0.3% of the adult population.
More debilitating side-effects include arthritis, diabetes, hypoglycemia and the growth of internal organs, which can place fatal pressure on the heart. It is widely believed that it was HGH which led to the premature death at 38 of Olympic double gold medallist Florence Joyner-Griffith (pictured below). "People with an excess of HGH in their blood," warned the dopers' guide The Steroid Bible, "rarely live past 60."
Those, however, aren't the only dangers. In its early days, HGH was harvested from cadavers, a practice stopped when cases of CJD amongst users began to be detected. While most HGH is now synthetic stock from Europe, the black market is not choosy about the source of hormones and one contaminated batch stolen from quarantine at Great Ormond Street is still in circulation.
"They keep finding samples of HGH which are still made from human corpse material," said German biologist Professor Werner Franke, a specialist on doping. "It's still made the old way and it's cheaper than ever. It is coming out of Russia and other such countries (particularly China)."
In Britain the one brake on the trade has been the police, who have prosecuted dealers selling HGH or steroids without the necessary prescription. Seizures of steroids (a generic category which includes HGH) in Scotland have risen tenfold in the period 2000-2006, on a par with Wales but a fraction of the steroid seizures in England, where the Home Office reported a 254% rise in the quantity of anabolic steroids seized in 2004. The number of steroid supply offences in England rose from 20 in 1996 to 640 in 2002, higher than LSD and methadone offences. All this suggests that steroids and growth hormones are easily available to those who want to use them.
THE ATHENS Games in 2004 recorded 26 doping cases, the highest number at any Olympics since testing began but still less than 1% of the 3667 tests collected. Anti-doping authorities such as WADA routinely suggest that over the past 30 years the number of positives has remained static at around 1-2%, even at major events, such as the Olympics, where the pressure to win is immense. However, that figure is at odds with the evidence of two in-depth studies conducted in Australia and Canada, which concluded that between 50-70% of athletes were using performance-enhancing drugs. And it is certainly at odds with the information gleaned from the UK's needle-exchange programme.
A survey of gym users in the UK in 1993 indicated that at least 5% of regular gym users were currently using anabolic steroids. No reliable current data exists, but with steroids more easily accessible and cheaper 14 years later, the number of gym users on HGH or steroids is likely to be higher, especially as, for any who take part in competitive sport, testing has become more sophisticated for steroids and there remains no test for HGH or insulin. There is, though, now a test for the previous drug of choice for endurance athletes, erythropoietin (EPO).
It doesn't, of course, help that the UK is the only major country in the world not to have an independent anti-doping agency for sport or to have implemented routine blood testing, despite the fact that the Government made extra funds available in 2003 and athletes like Paula Radcliffe and Hayley Tulloch are requesting it.
That leaves the UK reliant on organisations such as WADA and the IOC. Yet despite IOC president Jacques Rogge's statement that "doping is the greatest threat to sport", the IOC's determination to fight HGH has been in question since it cut off funding on the GH2000 research project in 2000 when endocrinologist Professor Peter Sonksen at London's St Thomas's Hospital was close to developing a verifiable test for HGH.
So it is now down to law enforcement agencies around the world to combat HGH. There have been seizures on the Tour de France, the high-profile BALCO case, and in 1998 Chinese swimmer Yuan Yuan was deported when she was caught carrying industrial quantities of HGH into Australia ahead of the world championships.
Closer to home, however, the problem continues to fester. "HGH gets little publicity, but its use is continuing to grow," said Scottish drugs specialist Dr Rob Dawson, who now runs a Drugs in Sport clinic at Chester-le-Street, near Newcastle. "Not only does it make for an unequal playing field in sport, but unless we do something it's only a matter of time before we will begin to see deaths among Scottish gym users as a result."
And when we do, we won't be able to say we weren't warned. |
© Anabolic Info
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