Juicers, Trippers, and Crocodiles: Patrick Arnold Profile in Discover Magazine

[Steroid News]

Interesting article about Patrick Arnold.

His virgin experience with steroids...

A week after Arnold took his first dose of liquid mestanolone, his life began to change. At the gym, he was on fire. The amount he could bench-press spiked and kept rising, topping out at 30 extra pounds. Soon his clothes were tighter, and his muscles popped with new veins. The physical transformation was hard to ignore, and Arnold confessed his actions to his office friends. “It got around; everybody found out,” Arnold recalls. “But I didn’t give a damn.”

Arnold left his job, moved back to Connecticut, and started taking graduate-level chemistry classes at the state university. He also joined an Internet discussion group on fitness and weight lifting. Arnold’s knowledge of steroids quickly set him apart from other members of the discussion group. People began to seek his advice.

One of them was former bodybuilder Dan Duchaine, the author of The Underground Steroid Handbook, an indispensable reference manual for juicers.

His involvement with helping athletes use steroids and avoid detection began with norbolethone and Tammy Thomas:

Arnold rationalized that the compound [norbolethone] was probably safe. “One dose of a steroid will never kill you, even if it is massive,” he later explained. Whereas psychoactive drugs can have immediate unpredictable and dramatic effects, steroids work primarily by activating genes, a slow process that only gradually yields detectable physiological effects. “Only with chronic intake will you see adverse effects from a steroid,” Arnold says. He did notice the compound turned his urine a dark shade of yellow, which led him to believe it might be placing a strain on his liver. On the other hand, he was on fire again at the gym. It was potent stuff.

Then there was THG

Then he spotted tetrahydrogestrinone, a compound never before used to create a steroid. It had three alternating carbon double bonds, called conjugations, that he had seen in some potent steroids, as well as an additional carbon atom that he recognized would give it extra strength. “I knew I was looking at an exciting structure,” Arnold recalls. “It’s very complex compared with other ones. It was more potent. People would not have to take as much. The stuff would have been invisible forever. It was perfect, perfect stuff.” He put clients on 10 milligrams a day, then reduced it to 5 milligrams when he was sure it worked.

Read more: http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/08-juicers-trippers-crocodiles-dangerous-underground-chemistry