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1 7 - 0 4 - 2 0 0 5 Scarred for life
BY JEFF CARROLL
Lake Central graduate Josh Imborek and friends just wanted to be better high school football players. They had no idea the dark path that steroids were about to lead them down. Josh Imborek was flat on the floor, the barrel of a shotgun pressed hard against the back of his head. Imborek had ventured into a home in Gary's Black Oak neighborhood to close a heroin sale. But his client became suspicious, convinced Imborek was a police informant. Life as an addict had taught Imborek how to slither out of tight situations, though, and he proved his credibility the best way he knew how: He shot up right in front of the man and the man's supportive posse. "That seemed to cool things down a little bit," Josh says now. But it didn't scare him straight. After leaving the house, Imborek continued a life careening out of control. At age 21 he was an opiate addict, dying for the next fix of heroin and prescription painkillers, namely OxyContin.
He never had dreamed it would get to this, of course, when he popped his first illegal drug, a steroid called Dianobol. Imborek didn't consider himself a drug addict. He was just another Lake Central football player who wanted to get better. Imborek was 16 years old when he decided to start using steroids. It was the summer before his junior year at Lake Central. He was familiar with the culture of supplements and vitamins, working part time at a health food store. Plus, Imborek played linebacker and defensive end for what was then one of the area's premier high school football programs. Imborek's best friend, a classmate whom The Times is referring to as Dave, knew an older neighbor who was a steroid user. He became their supplier. The neighbor would receive shipments from Mexico in Christmas tree-sized boxes -- shipments that included pills and ingestible liquids for the beginner and the squeamish, and injectables for the more hard-core users. "I got in touch with him, and basically he showed me the way," Dave said. "Me and Josh just started using all the time, getting big real fast." Frightened of needles, Imborek opted for the oral version of Dianobol. "You don't really hear about anyone who died of a steroid overdose," Imborek said. "The side effects are long-term, which won't affect you now, so you don't care. At least I didn't." Early during his use, Imborek was pulled over for speeding. The officer searched his glove compartment and examined a vitamin bottle filled with Dianobol tablets. Imborek's heart raced. Then the police officer, not recognizing the pills as anything more than over-the-counter vitamins, handed them back. It served to reinforce the sense of invincibility Imborek experienced because of the steroids. Scared enough of needles that he passed out while having his wisdom teeth pulled, the lure of becoming bigger, stronger and faster soon was too tempting to let a little phobia stand in the way. Imborek and Dave took a marker and drew black X's on each others' buttocks. Then they plunged the needles in each other, figuring the phenomenal gains were well worth the momentary discomfort. When Lake Central began practice late in the summer, Imborek was shocked to find himself trailing team speedster Jason Hurley by only a step in the 40-yard dash. As much as the Lake Central players were enjoying their otherworldly muscle and speed gains, they discovered there was a down side -- steroids were expensive for teenagers. So Imborek and Dave went into business, claiming they built a steady and profitable base of clientele, mostly at a local health club. "There'd be different people in looking for us at different times," Imborek said. "He took care of his guys, I took care of my guys. There was a wide variety of people. It ran from high school kids to old men." They also said they sold steroids to members of other local high school football teams. At some point, one of Imborek's friends realized there was a greater profit to be made in selling fake steroids than the real thing. "(One Lake Central player) was very good friends with a lot of the Munster people," Imborek said. "During the football season, he would get some customers, but they were really scared with needles. "He would sell them B6 vitamins, which look exactly like steroids. He would go into the health food store and spend $3 and sell it for like $125. They thought they were doing steroids, and they loved it." Imborek and Dave said they pleaded with their friend to stop defrauding the Munster players. "He said, '(Forget them),' " Imborek said. " 'We're Lake Central, and they're Munster. We're gonna be playing them, and we don't want them to be bigger than us.' " When Lake Central took the field against Munster, a group of Munster students unfurled a banner that read, "Got steroids?" Imborek's friend, the Munster players' supplier, raced by them yelling, "Got B6?" Most of their dealings, however, were for real steroids. Dave said he took over the sales to the Munster players, earning their trust. Munster coach Leroy Marsh declined comment for this story. Dave said the group also sold to students at other schools: Munster, Highland, Andrean, Valparaiso, Merrillville, Griffith and perhaps others he could not recall. The Times contacted each of the schools mentioned via either e-mail, phone or both. All who responded declined to comment. "There was a period of time during our high school years that if you used steroids in the area, there was a good chance it came from us," Imborek said. Imborek was devastated by the Indians' close loss to Penn in the regional title game his junior year. "We were like, 'We're not letting that happen next year,' " Imborek said. "We said we needed to do something hard when we lost to Penn. That became a priority over playing college ball. We needed to go to state." Though they were combining various steroids and taking them almost nonstop rather than in suggested cycles, Imborek said he and his friends sought an added edge in the weight room. They found it in Nubain, a clear liquid prescription painkiller used to assist women in labor. It's not as thick as many oil-based steroids, so Imborek and friends were able to inject it with insulin needles instead of the heavy-duty syringes steroids required. Imborek said he tried his first dose of Nubain on the way to a party and enjoyed the high the drug gave him. The next time he injected it was soon after, in the health club locker room. By the time he walked down the stairs to the weight facility, the Nubain had taken its effect. "The idea was that you could work out longer and harder," Imborek said. "The pain and burning sensation that you do get working out was gone." Imborek became sick after that first Nubain-fueled workout because he overexerted his body and didn't realize it. The drug masked the exhaustion. By that point, however, the health club was onto them. Imborek arrived one day to find his membership revoked. The banishment cut off a nice supply of income. Imborek said he and his friends then began selling Nubain to regular Lake Central students, taking the drug out of the weight room and onto the L.C. party scene. Some students were frightened of needles, but Imborek's sales pitch was that if you could feel the tiny insulin needle prick your skin, he'd refund your money. He boasted 100 percent customer satisfaction. Though the effects of steroids can be mentally addictive, Nubain is physically addictive. Imborek built up a fast tolerance. At first, a bottle would last him a month. Soon, the same bottle was barely enough to get him through the day. If Nubain worked to mask discomfort in the weight room, Imborek and Dave realized it also could come in handy on Friday nights. They began injecting it before Lake Central's games, and were delighted to find the effects of football's violent collisions numbed. But things were beginning to unravel. Imborek's mother, Robie, discovered his steroids, and Josh attempted to rationalize his usage by drawing a distinction between steroids and street drugs. "I was trying to justify it, saying, 'It's not like I'm out smoking crack,' " Imborek said. "I was real conscious of what I'd eat. I had a bottle of water with me all the time. I lifted weights. We all felt like we were making a good contribution to society." The Lake Central football coaching staff, Imborek is convinced, suspected his steroid use. Before their senior season, Imborek and another of his fellow users stopped by the school to retrieve a couple of helmets for use in a summer camp downstate. Then-head coach Elmer Britton, according to Imborek, told them the school district was considering drug testing. Imborek's friend assured Britton there was "nothing like that" going on. "The Lake Central coaching staff during my tenure discouraged the use of any supplements," Britton, now football coach at Logansport, responded last week in an e-mail. "I am disappointed that we did not have enough influence to prevent any usage that might have occurred." Imborek stressed that he takes sole responsibility for his behavior. "I still have total respect for the Lake Central coaching staff and administration during the time I was there," Imborek said. "These were things that a select group of us chose to do on our own." As the season progressed, Imborek worried less about steroids and more about his next fix of Nubain. Things came to a head in Lake Central's sectional victory against East Chicago Central. Early in the game, Imborek broke in half the ulna bone in his arm. He played the rest of the way, unaware of the pain. He didn't realize he was seriously injured until the pain increased as the drug wore off late in the game. By the time Lake Central's season ended the following week, with a playoff loss to Valparaiso, Imborek barely cared. He just needed his next fix. At age 18, Imborek was a full-fledged prescription drug addict. His promising football career was a washout. Then things got really ugly. Imborek had been offered the prescription painkiller OxyContin several times, but said he turned it down because he couldn't find it mentioned as a performance-enhancer in any of his body-building publications. But once football was over, Imborek said, he realized he could put an OxyContin caplet in his mouth for a few seconds and suck the protective coating off. That made it easy to break down and melt into an injectable form. "You feel like you're getting a massage, sitting in a hot tub and having sex at the same time," Imborek said. He began injecting 10 milligrams of OxyContin a day, but soon found himself needing 160 milligrams to fend off excruciating withdrawal symptoms. The effects of OxyContin, a drug that has exploded in popularity this decade, were similar to those of another opiate-based drug Imborek found himself enjoying -- heroin. "I was a tornado destroying anything in my path and not looking back to see what I had done," Imborek said. "I went through a cycle of getting caught by my parents and learning ways to get around them -- how to lie, where to hide it, I even made up friends I said I was with." Dr. Christopher Suelzer, an Indianapolis doctor who is an expert in the field of addictive medicine, said Imborek's experience is common among opiate addicts. "It's not about getting high, it's not about chasing a high," Suelzer said. "It's about chasing a normal." Around that time, Imborek's cousin Ryan visited from South Carolina. Josh and Robie Imborek said Ryan was using marijuana, and his mother thought a trip out of the area would clean him up. It didn't. Hanging out with Imborek, Ryan soon advanced from marijuana to steroids and then OxyContin. Like Imborek, he tried to clean himself up at a Methadone clinic. But instead of drinking the medication, he injected it. He was thrown into a coma. Taking just three breaths a minute, Ryan was perilously close to death, brain damage at the least. "We always thought that Josh had a chance to pull through all of this," Robie Imborek said. "It was different with Ryan (who was mildly autistic)." Somehow Ryan survived that overdose, but he died Sept. 1 of a heroin overdose, Imborek said. "That was really tough for me because the whole family knew that I was into drugs," Josh said. "At the funeral they just kept saying that they don't want to come to my funeral. "I think that if we had never crossed paths at that stage of my life, I would have never introduced him to OxyContin and Nubain. He would have never gotten into heroin. I know it's not my fault, but that goes through my mind. Had I not done some of the things I've done, this might not have happened." After several frustrating starts and restarts on the road to recovery, Imborek said he has been clean since July 5. He regularly attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings in Iowa, where he lives and works as a union carpenter. His shoulders are covered with tattoos to hide the "hideous" acne he acquired while using steroids. With the benefit of hindsight and distance, he has begun to understand what led him into using steroids and, eventually, even more dangerous drugs. Imborek grew up in Hammond and excelled in football at Gavit Middle School. But he said he was worried how he would measure up when he moved to much larger Lake Central as a freshman. He also had grown up in the shadow of his sister Katie, who was an All-Area basketball player at Gavit before transferring to Lake Central and playing on the Indians' 1998 state runner-up team. But Imborek thinks he can trace the origins of his addiction even further. When he was 3, Imborek was treated for a serious kidney ailment. His first drug-caused scars, in fact, are two unsightly hospital needle marks around his ankle. After surgery, he was prescribed a steroid. A scrawny kid up to then, he ballooned. As he grew older and more in control of his body, Imborek said he became obsessed with putting his youth as a self-described "chunky kid" behind him. He's convinced steroids already have taken their toll on his body, long-term. When his grandfather, his "best friend in the world," died, Imborek said he didn't feel anything. He attributes that to steroids. Low sperm count, a documented side effect, makes him effectively sterile. "The very first illegal drug I put into my body, before I smoked pot, before I tried cocaine, before I did heroin and long before I even heard of OxyContin was (steroids)," Imborek said. "Steroids did something to me that I cannot explain, something I have never gotten from any drug, any sex, or any euphoric state I have ever experienced. "I felt like Superman from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed." Imborek has been treated three times for drug overdoses. He knows that a next relapse could be his last. "I'm 22 now, and from what my eyes have seen, I almost feel like I've lived a whole life," Imborek said. "Some of the things I've been through, I wouldn't wish upon anybody else. We had a good time. There's things we wished we'd have done differently." |
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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
