I think it's a very good but complicated question. The short answer is...on the federal level, there are very few actual laws to protect criminals and certain authorities can circumvent federal laws to arrest, prosecute, and convict criminals with impunity.
Regarding the specific question, I'm sure LE could legally justify selling steroids through the mail over the internet as a source on the federal level but I highly doubt they would do so directly for just grabbing users like us.
However, by proxy, they would definitely do so as part of a bigger operation...remember that informants and cooperators are LE too.
When I was much younger I was involved with a lot of nefarious drug shit. I personally only know how things got screwed up with the acquaintances of mine who went down and some of the powers I've seen evoked by law enforcement to prosecute those people 15-20 years ago.
Police posed as drug dealers and drug buyers all the time but that was only either to flip buyers to become informants and LE cooperators...or...to make much larger busts happen. Large drug rings are usually brought down over many years of silent investigation.
I saw it work like this:
Someone who is usually, but not always, is well connected in a community gets busted and becomes an informant under threat of the harshest penalties which could be imposed.
Low level buyers who are well connected in a community net a lot of information on different sellers...especially if the buyer can get close to the them.
This leads to busts higher up the food chain. The higher up the chain LE can get the more severe the penalties become and the easier it is to get others to cooperate. Those who are higher up have much more to lose and the penalties are so severe it would destroy their lives so they cooperate.
In the LE operation model I now so love and am familiar with, these sellers would eventually be busted and flipped under the protection of LE in exchange for cooperation to avoid prosecution to the maximum extent of the law. The sellers (now working for LE) would continue with business as usual or disappear for a short while and return to selling. These sellers are the LE sources you would more than likely be dealing with. They would sell through the postal service and over the internet without getting LE's hands dirty directly.
In this model, sellers are allowed to operate under LE guidance while being given immunity to prosecution or reduced sentences while cooperating in an operation.
These selected sellers would operate to gather more information by getting more selected buyers entrapped to become additional informants and gather information on other sellers.
High level sellers are, of course, high level buyers since they get there products from someone else. The end goal in an operation like this is to use high level buyers and seller to find the suppliers, traffickers and manufacturers to prosecute and ride off into the sunset on a mythical centaur carrying the torch of liberty.
I can tell you that there are different degrees of autonomy and legal wiggle room granted to each LE agency and different "rules" for each agency. Same applies to rules within an agencies departments.
Depending on the amount of laws broken every agency can enlist other departments. If those departments can't do the job, they enlist other agencies to exercise their extended legal power if they can.
Once an investigation goes federal, there are very few laws protecting individuals and federal agencies do not have to abide by the same laws as local LE.
I had some intimate knowledge on some of the cases some of my former acquaintance were dealing with and all of the above was implemented in rounding up guys from the bottom to the top...whether this has or ever will happen with AAS is really just a matter of how important current politics dictate the matter of steroids are in America and how badly federal agencies want recognition for a job well done in making our country a more wholesome place.
So
@MisterSuperGod you can imagine how much manipulation goes on once a source gets busted and an operation begins on a drug bust if the feds are interested.
Once an operation goes after suppliers, manufacturers, and traffickers, agencies like the DEA, FBI, NSA, and IRS, are all involved and every charge you can imagine which is associated with these agencies are pressed for maximum sentencing.
Anyway...this was based on a couple of major meth busts that happened along the west coast in a federal operation that stretched from the mid 90's to the early 2000's
