Your Steroid Resource

Elite track coach Trevor Graham should not be sent to prison for lying about his role in distributing steroids to U.S. track stars, a federal probation officer says.

Instead, the probation officer has suggested Graham serve six months of house arrest for lying to federal agents who were investigating the BALCO steroids scandal, court records show.

Graham, former coach of the North Carolina-based Sprint Capitol track club, was found guilty in May of falsely telling agents in 2003 that he hadn’t spoken to a confessed steroid dealer, Angel “Memo” Heredia, for six years.

In a trial in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Heredia testified that he often phoned Graham to arrange drug shipments for Graham’s athletes. Three former sprinters who won Olympic gold medals - Antonio Pettigrew, Jerome Young and Dennis Mitchell - testified that Graham set them up with banned drugs.

Judge Susan Illston is scheduled to sentence Graham on Tuesday. She isn’t bound by the probation officer’s recommendation.

Graham’s lawyer, William Keane, has urged a sentence of community service, saying Graham’s conviction has destroyed his coaching career, court records show. Prosecutors want a 10-month prison term, contending that Graham’s “greed” led him to provide drugs to many athletes, including former Olympic superstar Marion Jones.

Jones, who was prosecuted in federal court in New York, served six months in prison for lying to the BALCO agents about her own steroid use. She also pleaded guilty to check fraud.

But last week in San Francisco, Illston refused to imprison another elite athlete convicted of lying about using steroids. Instead, she ordered former bicycle racer Tammy Thomas to serve six months home confinement on her convictions for perjury and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors wanted a 30-month prison term. Some experts said the sentence was a hopeful sign for former Giants star Barry Bonds, who is set to go on trial next year in Illston’s court, accused of the same crimes as Thomas.

Victorian BMX rider Daniel Galea has been suspended for two years after he was caught possessing and using steroids.

The Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) Friday announced that the former state champion accepted the ban.

He is ineligible to compete in all sporting competition for two years, dating from April this year.

Galea was found by ASADA to have possessed and used nandrolone, metenolone and methandienone at various times in 2007, and testosterone at various times in 2005 and 2007.

According to ASADA he attempted to import trenbolone concealed as another substance.

The four packets of liquid steroids, which were labelled non-allergenic personal lubricant, were posted through the mail and detected by the Australian Customs Service in late 2007.

“This sanction is another example of ASADA’s success in identifying and sanctioning serious anti-doping rule violations by athletes without a positive test,” ASADA Chairman Richard Ings said in a statement.

“By working collaboratively with other government agencies, in this case the Australian Customs Service, ASADA has been able to identify and sanction serious doping violations that previously went undetected.”

Steroids, or any drug for that matter, have been a hot topic in sports for the past few years and unlike the NBA or the NFL, the wrestling world is still suffering from the effects of the steroid allegations that have been running around them over the past few years.

I’m not going to beat around the bush. The question is, will wrestling ever recover from the steroid allegations and all of these WWE wellness suspensions?

The truth? No chance in hell. Wrestling will never be the same again. How could it? Thanks to these allegations, we have wrestlers getting suspended and eventually someone (coughJeffHardycough) will get their third suspension and get fired. If this went on in the 80s-90s, you would have one pissed off Warrior or a very angry giant.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am glad that the WWE is re-enforcing their Wellness Policy, but there is no doubting that it has hurt not only the credibility of pro wrestling, but the business as a whole. It need to be done.

Have you seen the list of wrestlers who have died before 50? It’s forever long. I’m glad something has been done to protect the safety of the performers, but truth be told it has, in some ways at least, damaged wrestling as a whole.

I don’t think wrestling will go back to the way it was before the Benoit double murder-suicide. That was when things really changed. After someone snaps like that and kills his own family, everyone takes notice.

Ever since then, Pro Wrestling has become a very different place. A better one, but now we have guys getting suspended (without pay, I’ll assume) and when guys like Jeff Hardy get suspended it really does damage their in-ring career. Which is never a good thing, but that’s the price the performers must pay. 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Young men who use anabolic steroids are twice as likely to engage in violence than those who do not use the muscle-building drugs, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

While many scientists believe anabolic steroids — synthetic drugs related to male sex hormones — are linked to aggressive behaviour, research has been limited. Some users refer to so-called “roid rage” fuelled by the drugs.

“We’re finding that steroid users are more likely to become violent, even above and beyond their prior levels of violence,” said Kevin Beaver of Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, whose study appears in the American Journal of Public Health.

“That would tend to suggest that there is something about steroid use that increases violence,” Beaver said in a telephone interview.

Beaver’s team looked at data on a nationally representative sample of 6,823 young men who were tracked from 1994, when they were in middle school or high school, through to 2002.

The men who used anabolic steroids either in the past year or at any time in their lives were about twice as likely to have committed at least one violent act in the past year than men who never used them — even when statistically accounting for other drug use or prior violent tendencies, Beaver said.

The violence included fights, shootings, stabbings or injuring another person badly enough to need medical attention. The men reported their own drug use and violence.

DALLAS – Oct. 14, 2008 – Adding corticosteroids to traditional antimicrobial therapy might help people with pneumonia recover more quickly than with antibiotics alone, UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists have found.

Unlike the anabolic steroids used to bulk up muscle, corticosteroids are often used to treat inflammation related to infectious diseases, such as bacterial meningitis. Used against other infectious diseases, however, steroid therapy has been shown to be ineffective or even harmful.

In a study available online and in a future issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, researchers at UT Southwestern show that mice infected with a type of severe bacterial pneumonia and subsequently treated with steroids and antibiotics recovered faster and had far less inflammation in their lungs than mice treated with antibiotics alone.

“Some people might think that if you give steroids, it would counteract the effect of the antibiotic,” said Dr. Robert Hardy, associate professor of internal medicine and pediatrics and the study’s senior author. “But it turns out you need the antibiotic to kill the bug and the steroid to make the inflammation in the lung from the infection get better. The steroids don’t kill the bugs, but they do help restore health.”

Pneumonia is a lung infection typically characterized by breathing difficulties and spread by coughing and sneezing. Symptoms include headache, fever, chills, coughs, chest pain, sore throat and nausea. Pneumonia caused by the Mycoplasma pneumoniae bacterium is generally a less severe form of the disease that can occur in any age group. It accounts for 20 percent to 30 percent of all community-acquired pneumonia cases.

In the current study, mice infected with the M pneumoniae bacterium were treated daily with a placebo, an antibiotic, a steroid, or a combination of the antibiotic and steroid in order to investigate the effect on M pneumoniae-induced airway inflammation. The animals were then evaluated after one, three and six days of therapy.

“It turns out that the group that got both the antibiotic and the steroids did the best,” Dr. Hardy said. “The inflammation in their lungs got significantly better.”

Although antimicrobials remain the primary therapy for M pneumoniae infection, there have been several reports in recent years about physicians adding steroids to the treatment regimen of patients with severe cases, Dr. Hardy said. The problem, he said, is that those were individual case reports.

“They never had a control group, so it was impossible to tell what impact the addition of steroids had on recovery,” he said.

The new findings not only suggest that giving antibiotics with steroids can help individuals with pneumonia get better faster, but also suggest a potentially more effective therapy for someone in the midst of an asthma attack due to M pneumoniae infection. Up to 20 percent of asthma attacks in children and adults have been shown to be triggered by this bacterium.

Dr. Hardy said it’s too early to recommend steroids as standard treatment for people with this type of bacterial pneumonia, but the work does support the need for a clinical trial.

“Or if there are very sick patients, this combination treatment doesn’t seem to worsen the disease,” he said. “The good thing about our results is the data alone support moving on to a clinical study.”

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Other UT Southwestern researchers involved in the study were Dr. Christine Salvatore, infectious-disease fellow in pediatrics; Dr. Chonnamet Techasaensiri, postdoctoral trainee in pediatrics; Dr. Asunción Mejías, assistant professor of pediatrics; Dr. Juan Torres, visiting senior researcher in pediatrics; Kathy Katz, senior research associate in pediatrics; and Dr. Ana Maria Gomez, assistant professor of pathology. Researchers from the University of Milan also contributed to the study.

The National Institutes of Health supported the work.