Comments on professional athletes in ancient Greece suggest that a wide variety of natural steroidal substances were used to promote androgenic and anabolic growth. These may have ranged from testicular extracts to plant materials. Traditional medicine in general, in the West as well as in contemporary Asian medicine, has a wide pharmacopeia of substances intended to promote virility and masculine traits, though not entirely oriented towards muscle growth and athletic ability so much as sexual performance. In Chinese traditional medicine, substances such as deer antler, tiger bone, bear gall bladder, ginseng and other roots and much more are all primarily consumed and were thought to bolster the male organism. Though there is no science behind these claims.

Modern pharmaceutical anabolic steroids are believed to have been inadvertently discovered by German scientists in the early 1930s , but at the time the discovery was not considered significant enough to warrant further study. The first known reference to an anabolic steroid in a US weightlifting/bodybuilding magazine is testosterone propinate in a letter to the editor in Strength and Health magazine in 1938. In the 1950s, scientific interest was rekindled, and methandrostenolone ( Dianabol ) was approved for use in the United States by the federal Food and Drug Administration in 1958 after promising trials had been conducted in other countries.

Throughout the '50s, '60s, '70s and even '80s there was doubt Anabolic Steroids even had a real effect. In a 1972 study, participants were informed they would receive injections of anabolic steroids on a daily basis, but instead had actually been give placebo . They reportedly could not tell the difference, and the perceived performance enhancement was similar to that of subjects taking the real anabolic compounds. This study had many flaws including inconsistent controls and insignificant doses. According to Geraline Lin, a researcher for the National Institute on Drug Abuse , at the time of the books' publishing in 1996 , the results of the study remained unchallenged for 18 years.

In the 1996 study mentioned above which was founded by the NIH it examined the effect of high doses of testosterone enanthate (600 mg/week intramuscularly for 10 weeks). The results showed a clear increase in muscle mass and decrease in fat mass in those who took the testosterone opposed to the placebo. No adverse reactions were noted.

The U.S. Congress in the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990 placed anabolic steroids into Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The CSA defines anabolic steroids as any drug or hormonal substance chemically and pharmacologically related to testosterone (other than estrogens , progestins , and corticosteroids ) that promotes muscle growth.

By the early 1990s after anabolic steroids were scheduled in the United States several pharmaceutical companies stopped manufacturing or marketing the products in the United States, including Ciba, Searle, Syntex and others.

In addition, an entire market for counterfeit drugs emerged at this time. Never seen in the previous 30 years of their availability on the U.S. market, computers and scanning technology made the ease of counterfeiting legitimate products by utilizing their original label design, and the market was flooded with products that contained everything from mere vegetable oil to toxic substances which unsuspecting users injected into themselves, of which some died as a result of blood poisoning, methanol poisoning or subcutaneous abscess.

Most illicit anabolic steroids are now sold at gyms, competitions, and through the mail. For the most part, these substances are smuggled into the United States. In addition, a significant number of counterfeit products are sold as anabolic steroids, particularly via mail order from websites posing as overseas pharmacies. In addition to the recreational use of anabolic steroids, users in Great Britain have been shown to consume illicit drugs as well, such as cannabis , and cocaine.

On January 20 , 2005 , the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004 took effect, amending the Controlled Substance Act to place both anabolic steroids and prohormones on a list of controlled substances , making possession of the banned substances without a prescription a federal crime.

Source: wikipedia.org