"Roid Rage is not a clinical term. There are no peer reviewed studies that have been published in a prestigious medical journal that conclude episodic rage is caused by exogenous androgens. While respected clinicians will not agree with the charge, "respected" journalists have made names for themselves with the trumped up term. Geraldo, Nancy Grace, Bill O'Reilly, and their ilk, trumpeted their message from the peaks of media mountains: On CNN, FOX, ABC, MSNBC, even ESPN, some authoritative voice could be heard feeding the camera lines that would instantly become the truth when they came out the other end on TV - "roid rage, from the illegal use of anabolic steroids, caused so-and-so to do such-and-such....." In reality, we know that the charges are not true. But it doesn't matter. In this game, steroids are bay-ud, mmmmm-kay?
That's not to say, paradoxically, that they are all good either. We always must remember that there is no such thing as a safe drug. The use of any medication - legal, illegal, prescription, OTC, performance enhancing, recreational, medicinal, moral, immoral, should be preceded by your own personal risk to reward analysis. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of being governed in a democracy is that it's accepted that some of those risk to reward analyses are going to be decided on in your behalf by people who are largely ignorant of the topic and really have no business doing so. Usually, it's the people who don't do drugs (but probably should) who tell us not to use them for the same reasons they don't use them. they just decided for us. For some reason we live under this blanket of protection provided by those who serve our country and we have given in to the idea that they should save us from ourselves from the stuff they feel is dangerous.
When it comes to illegal drugs- either for recreation or performance enhancement - we are preached the edict to just say "no" and chance serious consequence if we just say "yes." I don't believe in selective illegalities any more than I do in selective morality because I have always believed that if I wanted a savior, all I had to do was head down to the nearest church and get down on my knees and pray. As long as I don't hurt anyone else, I'm perfectly within my right to do anything I want to myself just as long as I pick up the tab. In the eyes of the government, the individual should have the unalienable right to be, over his mind and body, sovereign.
In a perfect world, enforcing this right should be a higher moral commitment than enforcing the law. But in reality, more often than not, legality overrides mortality, in spite of Plato's cogent philosophy against it. And that has saddled us with some pretty stupid laws. If you are using anabolic steroids and the drugs that go along with them today, you are exercising your own personal freedom and morals. Hopefully based on sound information and professional advice. That should be your own personal unalienable right. unfortunately, today, some of that requires tap dancing around the law, and an awful lot of you have signed up for dance school.
If you're that kind of guy, you would also be the kind of guy who'd want to defend the rights of those around you. In exercising your rights in a drug culture, what you want to avoid is the situation in which defending the rights of those close to you means defending them from yourself. I can't help but respect an athlete who endeavors to chase his dreams to their fullest extent by employing any means necessary to get there. From benching shirts and knee wraps to jabbing needles into their hide, to whatever else they do in order to endure gruesome workouts one wouldn't expect of an ox. I strongly support the concept that realizing your goals has nothing whatsoever to do with following a bunch of rules. While you're up on the high lonesome, no one should be looking over your shoulder. Likewise, you shouldn't be breathing down anyone else's neck.
Whatever your personal quest is, if you endeavor to take it far enough chances are you're going to be faced with doing some pretty insidious things, not the least of which being steroids. Ostensibly, you could look no further than your own backyard to find someone to tell you not to do them. Not me. Have at it fellas; chase your dreams and be all you dare to be. I, for one, am certainly not going to tell you not to use drugs. However, just as I've been one to honestly inform you of certain health and legal aspects that must be grappled with while using a course of androgens, there is a psychological end that needs attention too. In other words, there are definitely a few things you should never do when you're intake of androgens is high and you have a sensitivity to it.
While no studies exist to support "roid rage" enough of you have done enough stupid things and blamed them on your gear that it's hard to ignore any possible challenge to those respected studies. In analyzing some of these escapades it's difficult to believe that one androgen side effect is not increased aggression. And there is pathology to support the idea. Steroid hormone receptors are widely distributed in the brain and therefore steroid use may cause a number of psychiatric symptoms including withdrawal and dependency. Increased aggression, irritability, disinhibition and impulsivity with impaired judgments, psychomotor agitation, insomnia, anxiety, panic, depression and suspiciousness or frank paranoid delusions have been reported in clinical studies using anabolic steroids.
What the studies couldn't tell us is if these heightened psychological side effects weren't predisposed in the individuals who exhibited them would androgens aggravate these predispositions and enhance them the same way they enhance protein synthesis? Some guys just don't ever get their ire up, while other guys always seem to find that point where morality and legality collide and their freedom gets taken away from them. As painfully obvious as that sounds, it wasn't obvious enough to keep some of you out of jail. "Steroids make you more of what you already are" is the logical, compromising, and accepted explanation. And it's a fact of life for many athletes who live in a world that doesn't well tolerate 250-pound assholes.
Nevertheless, it has not deterred the use of "roid rag" as the backbone of many a criminal defense from battery and destruction of property, to homicide, to claiming the use of steroids caused temporary insanity. It may have worked a couple of times but most of those defendants have lamented the judge's decision not to buy it. They look at it like this: You may have been exercising your freedom when you took steroids. And they may or may not have contributed to your case. The bottom line is that your behavior violated someone else's rights, and/or the law. The judge really doesn't care why you did it. He just has to deal with the fact that you did and what damage was done. That being the accepted case, there are definitely certain conflicts certain people on juice would do well to avoid.
If you are predisposed to bouts of rage, are sensitive to androgens, are injecting 2,000 mg a week of test, and you live in a city such as Los Angeles where there is no ideal drive time, chances are better than good you're eventually going to blow a gasket behind the wheel. There were always stories at Gold's Gym (Venice, Calif.) of various bodybuilders getting into it with some poor sot who could never have imagined someone as big and nasty as they were would be getting out of the car he just flipped off. Sometimes the beating- either to the other driver, or his car- was so severe, the guy got hauled off in handcuffs. Juicing and driving really don't mix, as was best exemplified by one of the more colorful incidents that happened at the very dawn of the muscle boom.
There were these two guys who rumbled around Muscle Beach together in the early sixties. It was said that when the two of them- at over 300 fairly solid pounds apiece- were seated in the front seat of their ‘53 Chevy, their shoulders touched not only each other, but each side window, as well. There was talk of Eastern Bloc substances and the pair's strength was legendary. One of them appeared on the cover of a bodybuilding magazine of that era flexing his forearm with a bikini babe standing on it.
As legend has it, the pair was squeezed into the aforementioned vehicle one day and jamming across the San Fernando Valley in rush hour traffic when some guy in a convertible cut them off; not once, but several times. Eventually, one of the pair got out at a red light and walked over to the convertible, reached in, grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and yanked it clean off the steering column. He hurled it several yards down the street like a Frisbee, got back into his car, and they drove off leaving the offending driver stranded in the middle of Ventura Boulevard with no steering wheel.
In the years that followed many more stories surfaced, some becoming legend, of guys doing ludicrous things behind the wheel with the same common denominator. Rushing around in heavy traffic, getting stuck behind someone going too slow or driving like they didn't know where they were going, getting cut off, clipped off, or flipped off- it's all going to piss you off. A lot. Some of you more so than others. Commuting daily in a big city is going to eventually lead to sort of confrontation. It's unavoidable. How you handle it is what counts.
We always hurt the ones closet to us, the saying goes. And I guess you could say that's so of the homicides that are part of bodybuilding lore. While not necessarily proven to have been roid induced, the probability has been proffered and those who know the way these things can go can pretty much figure it all out. One thing is for sure though, if needles are coming in, then the guns should be going out. Having a firearm in the immediate vicinity of a high-end stack is a foolish and dismal proposition. Why give someone that option when there's a chance he will be out of his right mind? If there is no gun in the house, then no one can use it.
Before it gets to the point where assassinating your significant other in front of the kids becomes an option, you might want to end the relationship (God forbid you should back off your cycle). Having a girlfriend/wife is great- sometimes. Sometimes it can be a pain in the ass. Better to realize which it's going to be going in, because anyone sensitive to androgens is going to find their bullshit threshold seriously lowered once they start a cycle. Never gear up behind your chick's back either, especially if she first knew you off the juice. That would be totally unfair, and it would also deny her of a perfectly good excuse for why you strangled her.
If you decide to stick it out, the foolproof way to make it work all boils down to just two words: "Yes, dear." Chances are slim that's ever going to come out of your mouth on two grams of test a week. So, if you're having problems in your relationship, staring a cycle will sound its death knell, usually with dramatic consequence. Once I saw mounds of some chick's belongings strewn all over the lawn just below the balcony of the apartment she used to share with her bodybuilder boyfriend. Seeing such a seen has got to make you stop and say hmmm, because you can just imagine the fit that guy must have been having when he tossed all her shit out the window.
Catching your girl cheating on you should always give you a one-time free pass on cleaning someone's clock, especially if they hustled her knowing she was hooked up with you. The result can be spectacular if androgens are involved, as they were rumored to have been when this particular sequence unfolded in the parking lot of Gold's Gym one day. One rather well-known pro bodybuilder was getting the shit beaten out of him by another well known muscle head because he caught him stepping out with his chick. A few days later, the now ex-girlfriend, showed up at the gym wearing dark shades that only partially covered her battered face. Definitely, chicks should never cheat on their androgen-sensitive boyfriends when they're on.
If there was ever a place to be leery of attitude, your basic hard-core gym is a good place to start. Fights that erupt in gyms can be pretty serious affairs, considering those involved would be pretty fit and pretty powerful, not to mention the close availability of a variety of lethal weapons. A little spat could turn into something dreadful, as it certainly has, and as it did one afternoon up on the outside deck of World Gym. Some visiting hayseed wearing a tank top that revealed an acre of acne, asked a regular for a spot on some improbable bench. Not quite feeling like doing a huge bent-over row at the moment, he refused, telling the kid he didn't spot people. About 15 minutes later, the kid saw him spotting one of his buds. The kid went over and said something like, "Hey, I thought you didn't spot people." The telling off started, one thing led to another and fists start flying. The next thing I saw was the kid slumped against the weight stack of a lat pull-down machine with a lump over his eye the size of a pot roast.
Another time at Gold's, a ranting muscle head fresh off decking a gay guy who propositioned him, walked up to another gay guy minding his own business in see-through tights, and kicked him in the face just for looking sweet. This kind of behavior has got to be controlled no matter what. Guys tend to be a little more tolerant of each other than we are with women, but don't abuse the system. However, gay boys should never try to hustle a straight bodybuilder on an androgen load. They will get hurt.
Any dude packing a few thousand milligrams of test every week can tear up a shitload of pussy. Two, three, four times a day- no problema. Well, if you don't have a willing partner, it could be a problema. If your girl is one of those hot-blooded half-Cherokee, part-Latin insatiable nymphomaniacs who can appreciate your appetite and keep you well fed, you will be a happy man. If your chick is of a different disposition and only likes it every couple of days, and can't hang with your constant desire to bend her over the arm of the couch, you're going to have trouble. Unless you start spiking her oatmeal with Oxandrolone, you are going to fight over sex. Shit, I'd rather fight over money, the bills, the kids, the house, anything but sex. It's a fight no one wins. So, the only solution is for the chick to give in and never turn her man down for sex while he's on the juice. I'm dead serious, just do it- let him fuck you. As much as he wants, wherever he wants....... Yeah, right. Like that would ever happen. Accept it guys, you'll be making love to your hand. But, don't get caught, because that will piss her off even more!
The Rest of Your Life
Some guys will read this and wonder what the fuck I'm talking about because they are loading up two or three grams of test a week and are as docile as puppies. They don't throw fits or tantrums or punches, they tolerate waiting in lines, traffic is a good opportunity to listen to music, their chicks are cool, they love their jobs, and really nothing much gets under their collars. Power to ya. Everyone should be like you.
But, since they are not, and since some androgens will affect everyone differently, we need to be aware of the effects. In fact, some drugs are notorious for their psychological side effects. Several years ago, well beyond the statute of limitations, I cooked up a killer batch of Finaplex from the cattle implants and gave some to five of my close friends. By the 15th week, three of us were single and one was getting sued. Just coincidence? Who knows, but I'll tell you that once the first girlfriend got fired, it sure seemed like a good idea to the rest of us. I doubt seriously the circumstances would have been the same without the Fina.
The common denominator here all boils down to how strong your mind is compared to your body. If you are the guy who really gets pissy on juice, then you need to be acutely aware of your propensity to do damage and take responsibility for keeping your behavior in check, no matter how you might feel. It's just part of the deal.
Cashing in your aggression on the weight pile can be a hugely rewarding experience and leave you well enough spent to keep you out of trouble. Don't train like a wus because you think the drugs are going to do all the work for you. On the contrary, throw the fuck down! Train as hard and as intensely as you possibly can. Hit your body so hard you have to drag it out of the gym. It's the best thing for everyone.
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