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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
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1 3 - 0 3 - 2 0 0 5 Steroids built him up, brought him down
Ex-bodybuilder B.J. Stevens wants to teach others about the drug obsession that nearly ruined his life
By LEE ROOD
To hear his mother tell it, B.J. Stevens was the perfect son: honest, handsome and generous to a fault, a weightlifter who treated his body like a temple. He never drank alcohol or smoked, and he didn't like to associate with those who did.
But Stevens, 32, did associate with people who drugged themselves in other ways. Bullied as a teenager, the once-thin bodybuilder began a decadelong love affair with steroids after graduating from Mason City High School in 1991.
Stevens wanted so badly to bulk up that he traveled to Mexico to acquire anabolic steroids and, later, schemed to buy human growth hormone over the Internet. In time, he and a partner concocted their own version of human growth hormone, the muscle-mass-building powder that is hard to detect in athletes. They grew temporarily rich from sales.
Through it all, Pat Stevens said, her son never thought what he was doing was all that bad. "And nobody," the 79-year-old mother said, "was harmed from what he did."
In the wake of the national steroids scandal that has shaken the professional sports world, U.S. Justice Department officials have promised to get tougher on those who sell the drugs to improve athletic performance.
Stevens - one of the few people ever tried for steroid distribution in Iowa - believes he got lucky. Charged last year with many of the same federal charges as embattled BALCO founder Victor Conte, he could have faced more than 20 years in prison. In April, the onetime Mr. Iowa contestant will begin serving a 2 1/2-year sentence in federal prison.
Like Jose Canseco, maligned for his tell-all book alleging rampant steroid use in professional baseball, Stevens is a pariah among some former bodybuilding friends and associates. Gym managers and bodybuilders in Mason City want nothing to do with him. Some people, Stevens said, blame him for their own legal troubles since federal authorities unraveled the steroid ring stretching from Iowa to California. The soft-spoken college student said he was forced to move to another state after threats by a former business partner.
Today, Stevens is trying to put the experience to use while awaiting his time behind bars. Steroid use, he said, is much more common than the public is aware of, and more hazardous than casual users want to admit.
A budding professional trainer, he hopes to spend his post-prison career helping others understand the obsession that nearly ruined his life. Contrary to even his mother's perception, the drugs do harm, he said.
"People don't think steroids can become addictive," he said. "They're wrong. Steroids can ruin your life." The federal indictment read as though Stevens was the kingpin of a drug cartel. Stevens, however, was an unlikely candidate.
Pat Stevens said her son weighed 150 pounds as a high school freshman. She blames two of B.J.'s classmates for her son's obsession with steroids. When B.J. was in 10th grade, she said, two bullies began extorting money from him.
"They beat him up, and that went on for a whole year," she said. "It came to the point that the principal had to walk B.J. to his car every day." Stevens yearned to become stronger. He began lifting weights and decided at 19 he wanted to compete in a bodybuilding competition for teens in Johnston. That dream was dashed when, during his training, he fell ill with mononucleosis. He lost the 30 pounds he had worked so hard to gain.
The setback, he said, prompted him to buy his first round of steroids from another lifter he knew from a gym in Mason City. The results were powerful: In the first three weeks during the eight-week steroids cycle, he gained 25 pounds. In time, he could bench press an additional 75 pounds.
"That right there is why they are so addictive," said Stevens, who eventually gained almost 100 pounds.
In 1996, Stevens said, he went on a vacation to Mexico, where he met a man willing to sell him steroids. The man agreed to ship the drugs to him, which allowed Stevens to begin selling to other lifters. "At the time, I wasn't making a lot of money, but it was enough to support my habit and to live off of, too," he said.
Stevens said he placed first in two Mr. Iowa lifting competitions as a heavyweight in 1999 - something he said that wouldn't have been possible without steroids.
"You have to use them if you want to compete," he insisted. "People deny it, of course. . . . But you can always tell people who use and people who don't use. You would have to have some darn good genetics to be 230 pounds with 5 percent body fat."
The same year, he also met a bodybuilder named Nick Hanson, who would also be convicted in the steroid ring, in Mason City. The connection, federal authorities said, proved profitable.
According to the federal indictment, Hanson showed Stevens how to buy human growth hormone, which is used to treat AIDS wasting, over the Internet from a company in China. Human growth hormone offered benefits to bodybuilders that steroids didn't, Stevens said. Unlike steroids, human growth hormone was nearly impossible to detect in drug testing used by sports groups.
"I also did a lot of research on the Internet and learned how the two worked together," he said. "With steroids alone, you put on a lot of water weight. But with human growth hormone, everything you gain is lean muscle."
In 2000, Hanson was arrested for importing the growth hormone, but neither of the young men feared criminal consequences, Stevens said. Penalties for selling human growth hormone and steroids are significantly less than those for selling other illicit drugs, and the two knew of no Iowans who had been prosecuted.
Hanson and Stevens made thousands of dollars selling human growth hormone, Stevens said. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, however, importing shipments of the white, powdery substance became more difficult. "We tried it once, and the package got held up in customs, so we stopped doing it," Stevens said.
Stevens claims Hanson showed him how to order ingredients to make human growth hormone from a variety of companies over the Internet. The two concocted their own version, called Somaject, and packaged it to make it look as if it had been made by a legitimate German firm, according to court records.
Stevens admitted that he paid others to make up to 2,000 kits . He sold nearly all of them to Basil Han, another co-defendant from St. Paul, Minn., who was sentenced late last year to two years in prison. Han, federal prosecutors said, marketed the kits over the Internet to bodybuilders.
Hanson, meanwhile, sold his kits to connections in other states.
C.J. Williams, a federal prosecutor in Iowa's northern judicial district, said investigators have yet to track all those who bought the homemade human growth hormone from Han and Hanson. However, several bodybuilders connected to the ring have been prosecuted, and at least one more person is expected to be charged soon, he said. Hanson has yet to be sentenced because of medical problems.
If the ring's growth hormone were eventually traced to a big-name athlete, Williams said, federal authorities would probably pursue the case. "As a practical matter, though, we don't get into the drug use as much as the distribution," he said.
Like other defendants in the ring, Stevens initially lied when confronted about his activities. But he later decided to cooperate and eventually wore a wire to help with the prosecution of Hanson and Han, Williams said. Williams, who has a reputation for being tough on defendants, recently recommended the biggest sentence reduction of his career for Stevens. "Given the extent and nature of B.J.'s cooperation, I think he was deserving of a break," the prosecutor said.
Stevens today is an "A" student at a community college in a Southern state, taking courses on health and exercise. He continues to work out, but he avoids gyms filled with "roid-heads." Still, he said, many of his workout buddies - young and old - speak openly about wanting to try steroids.
"Ninety percent of the people who use steroids are hardworking people," he said. "They want to look a little better, get a little stronger."
Some men, he said, believe they are buying steroids legally by using online "life extension clinics." With little more than a blood test, he said, lifters are able to get prescriptions from licensed physicians. Those who use the drugs aren't discouraged by stories of "roid rage." Some, he said, seem to welcome the heightened aggression the drugs can cause. Many ignore warnings that the drugs can raise cholesterol levels, worsen acne, and cause depression, liver disease or kidney problems, he said.
One of the worst side effects of steroids, he said, is that they shut down testosterone production, depleting a man's sex drive.
"Are they addictive? I don't know. I'm down to 205 . . . and I used to be the strongest guy in the gym," he said. "The thing is, I was fairly educated. I knew where to inject them, how much to use. A lot of these guys have no clue what they're doing."
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