Steroid Nation: Wait and Switch

Can simply modifying steroids get users off the hook?

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When is a steroid not a steroid? When it's part of Barry Bonds' defense.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the lab of former BALCO chemist Patrick Arnold last week, looking for documents that will tell them whether the latest supplement created by Arnold caused Philadelphia Phillies lefthander J.C. Romero to flunk a drug test.

Arnold denies that his latest product, 6-OXO, contains the banned steroid androstenedione. He insists that Romero is using him as a scapegoat, while the pitcher claims Arnold is the cause of his current troubles. However the little spat turns out, there's a larger issue here, and it doesn't have anything to do with Romero's 50-game suspension. It has to do with the chemical shell game that supplement makers play with the feds. The big winner could be Barry Bonds.

The dirty little secret of the supplement industry is that anyone can sell steroids. Imagine you're making a peach cobbler and you add whipped cream. It's a peach cobbler with whipped cream, right?

Not in the logic of the steroid game. The addition of whipped cream makes it a new product.

That designation is vital, because federal law requires that the Food & Drug Administration identify, test and label a new compound before it can be officially called a steroid. In 2004, the feds did that with Andro, which is why Arnold—who pioneered the stuff—could be charged with selling a controlled substance if he knowingly put it in his 6-OXO this year.

But the same problem didn't exist in 2002 when Arnold created THG for BALCO. Back then, the powerful designer steroid wasn't classified as such because the feds didn't know about it.

As investigative reporter Jonathan Littman points out in an eye-opening report for Yahoo last week, the ex-head of the UCLA Olympic Analysis Lab, Don Catlin, admitted it in grand jury testimony on Oct. 23, 2003.

Q: "There is actually a list promulgated in the federal criminal code of several steroids which are outright prohibited. Is that correct?"
Catlin: "Yes."
Q: "Is THG on that list in the federal code?"
Catlin: "No."

Never mind that Arnold pleaded guilty in August 2006 to making what the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco called "steroid-like drugs." This bit of plausible deniability could be the only opening that Bonds defense team needs to say he was telling the truth when he told the grand jury that he hadn't knowingly taken a steroid.

It wasn't a steroid, they could say, it was merely steroid-like!

There's no way to stop steroid pushers from taking advantage of slow-moving government bureaucracy.

If Bonds is the big winner, we're the biggest losers. The reason is because there's no way to stop steroid pushers from taking advantage of slow-moving government bureaucracy.

"I wish we could do more," one federal investigator told me this week. "Undeclared drug ingredients in dietary supplements are a huge problem right now. The challenge is testing. These guys are constantly changing around molecules on us."

Anthony Roberts, a chemist who broke the story about the DEA raid on Arnold's company, Proviant Technologies, notes in his blog this week that Arnold has been cited on message boards lately, trying to get a sample of a new performance enhancer named S-4. The drug, also known as a Selective Androgen Receptor Modulator, is extremely potent but has a short half life, making it the latest undetectable thorn in the side of drug testers.

So there are still chemists out there, searching for the latest designer steroids or how to manipulate those drugs into new forms. And the laws that are designed to protect consumers might really be used to protect the players who are taking advantage of them.

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