Steroid Nation | Newsbeat Documentaries

the way people chase the dream of that perfect body is changing the pressure men are now facing is similar to what women have had to deal with for decades diets workouts days spent in the gym and for many young men especially anabolic steroids are being increasingly used to help achieve that dream in this film I'm going to find out from one user why he takes them and put him through a series of tests to see what damage if any they've done to his body I'll hear from the experts look at the law surrounding steroid use

in the UK and speak to a dealer about why he does it Gareth Jenkins who's 29 and live just outside of Cardiff is one of the estimated hundreds of thousands of people who regularly take anabolic steroids to build muscle but using steroids for about four or five years when you train naturally which I have done for a number of years before uses steroids you you tire quicker you eat more and obvious when you use the opponent performance dancing drug which is a steroid you don't you don't have those muscle soreness anywhere near as much feel

more awake I feel better in myself I feel more manly I've got a higher sex drive there are some serious potential risks you're running from a medical perspective about using steroids things like increased risk of heart attacks increased risk of strokes mood swings infertility do those things not worry you the way that I look at it is yes they do bother me obviously but like everything you're aware of the risk you bully away yeah I've done my research to to see obviously what harm they would have on me or potential harm they would have on

me over a prolonged period of time if I was using them or using them correctly or incorrectly but the fact of the matter is in terms of the risks is everything that we do in life now carries a risk of heart attack cancer whatever it is so whatever it is I'm going to get those risks anyway so I choose not to do certain things and I choose this is my life time instead so if I don't quit drinking and smoking I take steroids steroids can cause health problems because they create an imbalance of hormones in

the body which can damage many organs but especially the heart Gareth says he tries to minimize any risks by taking his steroids in cycles by 16 weeks on and then eight weeks off there's two types of steroids there's one that comes in a liquid form there's an intramuscular injection that's this type so you inject down I would inject this into directly into a muscle two times a week and then the other type is a tablet form when I'm using these type this type of steroid I would use five a day for seven days and basically

five a day every day so over the course of a period of around six months when you're on steroids for that long roughly how much do you think you spend on them rough guesstimate probably with the cycle itself and the post-course treatment would be irrelevant five hundred-pound respect that's a lot of money it is it's probably a lot less in six months if somebody would spend on drink on a weekend worth it you think for me personally yeah when it comes to the law on anabolic steroids it is legal to use them and legal to

possess them right across the UK what is illegal though is supplying them unless you're a doctor and that means either selling them or just passing them on for free if caught you could face up to 14 years in prison because Gareth's only using steroids not supplying them he's not in any trouble with the law it could be a different story with his health oh so later this week he's agreed to go to London for a series of tests that will find out what damage if any he's done to his past to become the basis started

with making his own bully believe I was younger I mean small and if she was a feral child at the school so I just ended up locking myself away in a gym training and getting bigger and getting stronger and get an inked or sort of fell into one big sort of procedure than I seem to be do it in a lifestyle and pretty much yeah in the middle is not nice besides all that so going into London to have all those tests done some excited about to be honest with you yet slightly nervous but obviously

it could come back and say that it's something it'll be wrong and if I don't change my lifestyle then obviously I'm healthy my prediction is I think I'd be pretty stupid or naive to think that my heart wouldn't have changed you know four or five years the use of any performance-enhancing drug this anabolic is gonna have that effect so I think if it hasn't then why I've been taking this fake and I've done it naturally so and obviously if it is significant then it'd be absolutely no doubt in my mind that I want to change

my lifestyle overnight whether people use or abuse anabolic steroids is a matter of opinion for some in the medical world if steroids aren't prescribed by a doctor then it's simple taking them is abuse many people who research dosages and try to minimize the risks though would say they don't abuse them but instead use them one thing that is widely agreed on though is that the issue is now affecting more people than ever before we don't know the exact number of anabolic steroid users that are but it certainly measures in the hundreds of thousands we're seeing

now a different population of users while we still have people who are using purpose of bodybuilding we're seeing a new population of predominately young males but also quite older males as well and who we use in purely for cosmetic purposes there's a number of pressures on young man and most of these press you weren't around a generation ago these are things like social media they can be mainstream advertising have you seen a male with their shirt off they chances are they will have quite a well-defined physique again males may not be geared up to dealing

with this this is something that women have had to deal with for generations but this is quite a new thing for men for Gareth he's about to undergo a series of tests that will check what damage if any he's done to his horse the person in charge is cardiology doctor Anil mofetta we're gonna do three tests today your first is to look at the electrical activity of the heart the second is to look at the heart and muscle itself yeah and the third to actually exercise your heart we'll see how NHS guidelines say that by

taking anabolic steroids Gareth's risking side effects like infertility mood swings and even heart attacks and strokes just assessing how quickly the blood flows through that valve and we were able to see whether there's any narrowing of the valve or any leakages as well I spent them spectively all showing some form of thickness or abnormality to the hi it's Bank have changed in some way after four or five years of taking a performance-enhancing drug the British cardiovascular Society says tens of thousands of people could be putting themselves at increased risks of the most serious side effects

by taking anabolic steroids I'm slightly towards a cheesecake and I'll get it I'll get it billionaires cheesecake on the horizon let's get me after pushing himself to the limit Gareth will be able to find out how his heart has performed what affect his sterile use as with hundreds of thousands of people now thought to be taking steroids every year right across the UK clearly they're getting them from somewhere but government figures show that for the whole of 2015 and 2016 right across England and Wales there were just 25 convictions relating to the illegal supply of

steroids and just seven of those ended with a prison sentence so for this man who spoke on condition of anonymity the law hasn't come close to stopping him from dealing we know you supply steroids we know you're a steroid dealer obviously it's illegal you're breaking the law a lot of people would say you're putting people's lives their health certainly at risk what you say to that start off with the health risks and I think steroids are readily available to anyone who wants to access him at the moment I'd like to see myself as more as

someone who provides information you know to ensure people can do it safely people are gonna use them regardless of wherever they buy them for me or whether they buy them from an unknown source online but if they could talk to me about it then how to inject themselves safely or look at doses or if I could help them even if not - takes too much if I don't think it's appropriate for them then I will well that's the reason I try to that's the reason I'm involved in it who are the types of people getting

them from you who's coming to you for these steroids there's a very broad spectrum of people that you still return you range from young guys at 18 years old 19 20 and they're just starting out and they're training and and they're looking to bulk up for maybe a summer holiday or just to look good on a holiday for a summer holiday or they just want to track the girls to want to go out on a night air and attract the girls these are the guys that are less aware so these are the guys that you

have to be more informative when you talk to them about making them more aware of the risks and the dangers if you go an Instagram page and looks a certain way and he's got 300 flowers of likes and women comment on him saying I look amazing you know this you know that because he's well-built yeah and guys going on oh you look really bad for your arms a huge Minh all that sort of stuff for comments that you see these young guys full pressures to try and strive to achieve that even ten years ago before

social media was around he was only judge why appears that people to you and that you met what about the health of the people who you're giving these who you're supplying these drugs to they can face things like infertility they can face mood swings they can face getting strokes decades earlier than the average heart attacks it's illegal for a reason yeah I don't agree with it being illegal because I'll tell you that doctors prescribe testosterone to people so if there's a reason you're not a doctor no no I'm saying that doctors prescribe it so steroids

or testosterone in this example if it was killing people left Ryan sinner then they won't be prescribing it and I think the media sensationalizes it and I'm gonna tell you now these people that abuse steroids and they do damage their HOF and that's their choice one man who's all too aware of the risks of taking steroids he's got on the black market is Gareth and after using them for nearly five years he's about to find out the effect they've had on his heart all right yeah so I've got your ECG tracing senior echo report and

the reports from the exercise testing as well yeah what it shows is that your heart is working well right and that's and you've come through your exercise test world as well yeah and but we do think that you're at the upper limit of normal in terms of more thickness of your heart right and that is most likely due to your weightlifting and your steroid yeah and you are still young and you've not been using service for that long but if one does continue to do so then you are putting yourself at increased risk of heart

attacks and potentially even strokes as well yeah you know steroid usage does have a variety of bad effects on the class myself is quite a sensible person taking my own health into account that it would just be sensible being the key word to just not push that boundary to the point where somebody isn't reversible so not keep using self not keep use of steroids yeah or for the better cheaper too it looks like Gareth's steroid days might be numbered but he's just one of hundreds of thousands of users dealers are unlikely to get caught the

number of convictions for supply is low and doctors won't change worried about potential long-term health problems for users so is change on the way well we do know that the group that advises the government on drugs misuses in the middle of a big review into steroids we don't know yet what it's going to say