NUBAIN: BODYBUILDING’S MOST DENIED ADDICTION

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Posted by John Romano  

I wrote this almost 20 years ago. It was shortly after my second attempt to kick nubain. It took one more fall off the wagon for me to finally kick it once and for all. I haven’t touched it since. But going back and reading this article brought many of those horrible memories back to me. Since I was asked about my nubain use on Off Topic last night, and since the thread I started this morning – reaching out to fellow addicts – got so much attention, I thought you all might find this oldie but goodie interesting…..

NUBAIN: BODYBUILDING’S MOST DENIED ADDICTION

“This thing upon me, crawling like a snake,
It’s not death, but dying will solve its power.
In some cheap room, they will find me there,
And never know my name, my meaning,
Nor the pleasure of my escape.”
– Charles Bukowski

It’s a beautiful summer afternoon in Malibu, but I’m lying in bed. The TV is on, my eyes are shut, my head is splitting and I swear my skin is crawling off my body. That trite frying egg public service announcement of your brain on drugs is audible from the tube, the image is so vivid in my mind I needn’t bother open my eyes. I provide the pictures as the add drones on….

Such irony. I can vividly remember the anti-drug films I watched in horror as a kid – showing those sawed off eyedroppers the junkies used to boot up. Cooking up their fix in a spoon over a candle, then wrapping a belt around their arm to get a vein to pop out so they could hit it. I grimaced when they did. Aghhhhh!! How could anyone do that?

I never needed a belt. No-sir-ee, the veins were a dime a dozen, and I used brand spankin’ new insulin needles of a far finer gauge than that ludicrous eyedropper. I was also pulling my fix out of a multi-use pharmaceutical bottle – no grungy teaspoon swirling over a candle. Heroin was far more diabolical. Yet here I am – willing to tie my wrists to the bedposts. I seem to remember that scene too; the guy in his underwear, restrained at all four corners, writhing in his sweat soaked sheets. It’s ridiculous – I know how he feels.

A lot of you guys do too. We call it “no-bain.” When the Nubain runs out and your guy doesn’t have more, or if you’re kicking it for good – or for a while…..

My skin inches further. I’m so absorbed in the ebb and flow of a string of sensations I could never had believed existed – I barely noticed when Shelley walked into the room. Now I had to keep it together – she can’t find out now- I’m almost done. Just two more days and I’ll be free. She hops up on the bed and runs her hand up my arm – my skin bolts, the hairs on my neck stand up – I’m biting the inside of my cheeks.
“What’s wrong?” She asks.

I tried to be creative – she saw right through me – it wasn’t pretty…..

Take away the delivery method and the drug is the least lurid of vices, really. Unfortunately it is physically addictive. But so is alcohol. At least nubian warns you on the package insert:

Abrupt discontinuation of Nalbuphine HCL following prolonged use has been followed by symptoms of narcotic withdrawal, ie., abdominal cramps, nausea and vomiting, rhinorrhea, lacrimation, restlessness, anxiety, elevated temperature, and piloerection.

A bottle of tequila doesn’t warn you about the dry heaves and the shakes you’ll have when you go cold turkey after a few years of continuous use. You can’t OD on nubain either, (nalbuphine hydrochloride is an agonist-antagonist analgesic making it kind of self-leveling). Can’t say that about alcohol. You could drink yourself to death tonight.

The sad thing is that however sterile the environment, no matter how health conscious the user, the user is still a junkie. Four or five hours after your last shot you start jonesing. In true junkie fashion, you must go to your bottle for a fix. Your bathroom is just a shooting gallery.

The junkie image is so hard for us to accept because nubain users don’t look like the scrawny strung out heroin addicts depicted in our sixth grade propaganda films. They are big strapping people that work out every day, take their vitamins and eat lots of clean healthy food. But, several hours overdue for a shot and the differences mean little. At that point, the junkie is the guy with only one thing on his mind.

For those who don’t know – Nubain, formally nalbuphine hydrochloride, is a potent analgesic (it’s potency is equivalent to morphine on a milligram basis), used for the relief of moderate to severe pain. The very same pain a bodybuilder experiences if he’s training as hard as he should. A quarter of a cc, IV, before you leave for the gym and you can train so far into your quitting zone the other stuff you’re stacking has got to work. It’s just one more drug thrown into the array. Especially since, in addition to its pain killing effect, nubain is also thought to be highly thermogenic as well as anti-catabolic. It’s a bodybuilder’s dream drug.

The funny thing is though – you’ll never hear of a bodybuilder in the off season, sitting in front of the tube, wishing he had a shot of Decca. In addition to its ergogenic effect on your training, nubain also gets you high. Really nicely high. Doing whatever it takes to win rarely feels good. Nubain is exceptional in that regard.

In reality though, one can’t enjoy the virtues of the drug without delivering it. In this case that involves some pretty sinister tackle. It’s not much of a deterrent though. Once you realize the reward outweighs the apprehension, you won’t be stopping for a while – feeling rotten if you don’t shoot up is a powerful motivator. One far greater than any image I grew up with.

Some athletes stay oiled year round, some don’t. Unfortunately, the men and women who use bain to train gradually use bain to maintain. Four, five, six times a day is a reality many of us end up living. Track marks are an added disgrace. No matter how many veins you have sticking out, you always manage to hit the same few spots. Makeup works to some degree, but mid length sleeves are more innocuous. Just ask a junkie.

So why take it? Why does a chicken cross the road. So many bodybuilders do. I was introduced to nubain by Dan Duchaine thinking it was just his little discovery. As time went by I found myself on the ever expanding common ground of many of my fellow gym members. I can’t believe how completely this drug has permeated our culture. Everyone’s heard of it. Most steroid dealers stock nubain right along with GH, IGF, and steroids. A dealer knows that most guys buying show stacks are also looking for nubain.

Ever wonder how drug dealers obtain huge amounts of US made pharmaceutical drugs such as, among other things, nubain? The Latin American stuff is pretty easy to understand. The drug laws in Mexico, Central, and South America regarding steroids are much more slack than here in the US. It all comes down to effective smuggling. But, authentic US made drugs must be falling off a truck somewhere. Nubain is not scheduled as its morphine cousin. Although it is illegal to possess without a prescription, doing so is not a felony like the schedule three drugs are. Nor are the drugs as tightly controlled at the manufacturer. So are we to then assume that all the black market American made drugs out there are stolen?

Large pharmaceutical companies such as Astra and Dupont sell billions of dollars worth of product worldwide; losing track of a few thousand dollars worth of nubain is a problem they’re not likely to solve any time soon. Nubain is here to stay, much to the delight of the dealers because each new customer is a long term annuity.

The two most common manufacturers of nubain are the aforementioned Dupont and Astra Pharmaceuticals. I called both to try to find someone who could answer a simple question such as, “how can so much of this stuff disappear out your back door?” I was shuffled between departments and told I would get return calls by someone in public relations. Dupont was basically non-compliant, while a representative from Astra did return my call. The media rep had no comment as to how so much of their product could end up in the wrong hands. She explained there were policies in effect in their shipping department to control product disbursements and basically passed the responsibility off to the company’s numerous distributors. Any further comment would be handled by the company’s parent office in Sweden, for which they only had only a fax number. I used it, and as of yet, I’ve no reply.

The bottom line on nubain is this: I hate to say it but, anyone competing at the upper echelon, spending tens of thousands of dollars every season to compete certainly would consider, and many times does include nubain. He who does choose to step up to the plate will decidedly have an advantage. However, he also avails himself to the very real probability that its use can easily be perverted into something dreadful.

Those who use nubain for recreation are not immune to drug dependence either. Most long-term users manage to stretch a 10 cc bottle out for about 10 days. Four shots a day for 10 days costs about a hundred bucks. That’s an extra $300.00 a month to add to your nut. Not to mention you must also be willing to accept the fact that if you miss your shot you are going to get sleepy, sneezy, headachy, nauseous and in general – feel like dreck, jonesing for more. If you can handle the jones for three or four days you’ll be free. But can you really ever stop? It ain’t easy.

Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs)

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Posted by John Romano  

My usefulness to the media seems to ebb and flow. I go months without so much as a friend request on Face Book then all of a sudden I have producers from three or four acronym news agencies sending me e-mails looking for a quote, or a lead, or whatever (I’m going to refer to the various news agencies that talk to me as “acronym” rather than spell out the network initials. I tend to think that the less I hear from them the further off the radar screens we’re falling and maybe if enough time goes by no one will really care again if healthy adult male athletes use steroids.

And, every time I get the feeling that little blip is going to disappear some fucking moron does something true to character. Then all of a sudden I get three e-mails, with acronyms in their return addys, asking me about that douche bag virgin-murder in Santa Barbara and if it’s true that “creatine” is a code word for “steroids” in the online communities.

These kinds of occurrences, while disappointing, are still none the less indicative of just how much the steroid issue is languid in stagnation. Nothing really changes, does it? “Steroids are bad so lets prove it” is the mantra of any news agency worth its salt. The seedier the news organization the more relentless and exaggerated the plot. Its getting to the point where I think I’m just going to change my e-mail address because this is getting very boring.

My faith was somewhat stimulated by the end of a conversation I had recently with a producer for a sports channel. He asked me the most basic of questions, really. Nothing sensationalistic and actually rather bland. He asked me what I thought would be a promising new compound/therapy/drug/whatever that might currently be in development that will take the place of traditional PEDs such as steroids.

As luck would have it, just as I was waiting out the question and getting ready to launch into my next-generation peptides or the Chinese gene doping schpeal from which I use to give them talking points, an email came through. Of course I opened it – you think I don’t multi task? – it was from a guy asking me if tamoxifen will reverse his gyno. Then, rather than go into the peptides or the Chinese gene doping schpeal – because I got derailed thinking about what a great tool tamoxifen is because it can selectively modulate (adjust) estrogen receptor activity – it was then that I had that “ah-ha” moment.

Photo provided by www.sarmssearch.com

The most efficient treatments are always those that don’t “insult” surrounding tissues, or at least not to any great extent. The more specific, or selective, the treatment, the greater the chance of the desired effect. Many traditional cancer treatments, even more modern chemo therapies that “target” specific cancer cells, demolish the immune system in the process. More often than not the patient dies from the treatment and not the tumor. It’s like the weed killer killing the weeds along with the rest of the lawn.

In some time, the foregoing will be considered ancient medicine, such as the holes found poked in 1,000 year-old Peruvian skulls – the perimeters of the holes in the skulls show advance stages of healing, indicating that 1,000 years ago they were drilling holes in people’s heads in an attempt to “cure” something. One-thousand years from now, the remnants of chemo therapy will look just as barbaric in light of specialized technologies that can isolate and eliminate a brain tumor without even so much as taking off your hat. One-thousand years ahead of them, no one will even get brain tumors anymore due to something like a nano-bot vaccine injected into the amniotic fluid during the end of the first trimester that weeds through the genome of the fetus and programs out the possibility of developing specific types of cancer cells – or any other known viruses, infections and diseases – throughout its entire life, which could conceivably be very long. Selectivity at its finest.

“Selectivity” is the real difference between modern and ancient medicine. The more modern medicine gets, the more we will see selectivity be enhanced until medicine is a matter of identifying a problem then dispatching a specialized therapy designed to selectively hone in on just the specific cells that need modulating, and not bother anything else. Scientifically, we are at that level now. The capability does exist.

A drug that can either block or stimulate the same nuclear hormone receptor under different conditions is called a selective receptor modulator. If it can block or stimulate a receptor in a tissue selective manner, it may be able to mimic the beneficial effects in one tissue and, at the same time, minimize the unwanted effects of the natural or synthetic steroidal hormones in other tissues.

Given the state of affairs in the scientific community today, it is totally possible to, if not step above then certainly step along side, the typical courses of steroids and androgens. Technology exists today to, to some extent, introduce a means to selectively target and modulate androgen receptor cells to phase out the undesirable side effects typically associated with exogenous hormones and enhance the desirable effects.

Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs)

SARM’s could offer the athlete the benefits of traditional androgens such as testosterone – increased muscle mass, increased strength, fat loss, etc. – while offering a much lower tendency to produce the unwanted side effects that are common with androgen use.

If you are able to stimulate a receptor in a tissue selective manner, e.g., muscle, it is possible to mimic the beneficial effects of androgen activation in muscles, and at the same time, minimize the unwanted effects of the natural or synthetic steroidal hormones in other tissues.

It is this specificity that makes these receptor modulators able to selectively cause muscle growth, while reducing or eliminating unwanted secondary side effects.

SARM’s offer the potential for harnessing the benefits of anabolic supplementation while at the same time minimizing the undesirable side effects. They also have the potential advantages of oral dosing, which is very limited when it comes to androgens.

Although still at an early stage of development, the potential for SARM’s is very high, because SARM’s offer high oral bioavailability without insult to the liver as with oral androgens and even some prohormones. SARM’s are anabolic even at low doses with high potential for increased strength, muscle mass, lowering body fat, endurance and recovery.

While the jury is still out on SARM’s as far as full blown admission into the bodybuilder’s arsenal of strength and mass gaining tools, they are still legal and do offer promise based on quite a bit of published research. I suggest investigating these compounds and giving them a try. There is certainly enough science to support their use today.

Clenbuterol, Oxandrolone, and the CrossFit girl who tested positive for them

 http://romanoroberts.com.mx/clenbuterol-oxandrolone-and-the-crossfit-girl-who-tested-positive-for-them/

Posted by Anthony Roberts  

Yup…I wrote this book.

A CrossFit Regional-level athlete has tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. I care little about the impact of this positive test in the CrossFit world per se, but I will mention that she did not go to the CrossFit Games this year, and that her positive test was about a week prior to ‘Games. Make of that what you will, my focus will remain on explaining the drugs she tested positive for, what they do, and how they do it.

[If you just want the drug info, I've red-bolded each name prior to their description. If you want a TL;DR that's even shorter, you're on the wrong site.]

The athlete in question was Nikki (Nicole) Carlin. She’s a CrossFit athlete (tenth in her region for 2014, according to CrossFit.com) and Weightlifter (i.e. she competes in Olympic Weightlifting). She is sponsored by Weider, under their CrossFit brand, WFit, and according to her profile on their site, she has competed in Crossfit since 2010, has been to the CrossFit Games in 3 out of those 4 years, placing as high as 15th (team) and 16th (individual). I’ve been unable to validate those claims through the leaderboard on CrossFit.com.

” I’ve competed in Crossfit since 2010. During that time Ive been to the games 3 out of the 4 years. Second year placing 20th, third year placing 15th on a team and this last year 16th as an individual. “

Carlin tested positive for oxandrolone and clenbuterol, as announced recently by the United States Anti-Doping Agency. [Before we get into the specifics of those two drugs, let's not put too much faith in the moral compass of the anti-doping authorities. Travis Tygart, the man running the show at USADA, was also USA Swimming's legal counsel when they successfully covered up the biggest and most widespread sexual abuse scandal in the history of organized sports. So when they're not busting Lance Armstrong, USADA is helping pedophiles cover their tracks. Now that we've got that out of the way...]

The drugs Carlin was caught using are fairly standard for women. One was a steroid and the other was an asthma medication. Before you go all Google-warrior on me, I’ve written most of the information you’re going to find about both of them ( i.e. what you’ll find on Steroid.com, iSteroids.com, ThinkSteroids.com, MesoRx.com, and about half a dozen other sites). Those profiles were written a long time ago, and the research has evolved (*despite those sites having devolved), as more studies have been done. What follows is my current best thoughts on those drugs, as they relate to the topic at hand.

The first one, Clenbuterol is in a class of medications known as beta-2 agonists. If that description is slightly outside your vocabulary, we’re talking about compounds in the same class as ephedrine. Yes, ephedrine, the stuff in fat-loss pills that was sold by the metric ton at every GNC throughout the ’90s, is a beta-2 agonist. But while ephedrine is generally had in 20mg pills, Clen works in microgram amounts. Tablets are normally 20-40mcg/each, and liquid versions are similarly dosed.  It was never sold over the counter here in the United States, although it’s very popular in Mexico (where it’s available OTC). The closest thing we have here is Albuterol, which is sold as a bronchial dilator. Albuterol is nearly the same thing as Clenbuterol, but the half-life is significantly less, as is the detection time. If I were inclined to use either to improve performance, I’d stick with Albuterol.

Beta receptors are embedded in the cell’s outer phospholipid membrane, and are stimulated by all the really fun stuff I just mentioned…ephedrine, clenbuterol, etc…When you stimulate your beta receptors, some of the effects are increased blood flow and the break down of fatty acids into the blood stream for use as fuel. Beta-2 adrenergic stimulation can also increase your body temperature a bit, by increasing the amount of heat produced by mitochondria, increase your basal metabolic rate, and decrease your appetite. Put this all together and you have a pretty reasonable compound for fat loss.

Clenbuterol also has the widely disputed ability (or does it?) to aid in muscle gain and prevent muscle loss, plus increase the contractile ability of striated muscle. Although this has been displayed robustly in numerous animal studies, the same data in humans have been inconsistent at best. This is largely due to the FDA, and the fact that they aren’t huge fans of this compound- hence studies on it performed within North America, on humans, are rare. In the animals typically bound for the slaughterhouse, it’s great for increasing lean carcass weight and reducing fat. It’s also been shown to increase performance in horses and the like – but again, real solid data in humans is lacking.

A small dose, just enough to open the bronchial tubes, but not enough to severely affect cardiac output, might improve performance in humans. At that low of a dose, it’s unlikely to have a huge impact on fat loss – while at huge doses it can melt fat pretty quickly. That’s good because beta receptors downgrade very quickly, and most people stop seeing results within a few weeks, unless the dose is increased, and at that point you can run into hypertensive issues. Taking too much clen can overstimulate people and cause anxiety, the shakes, or insomnia.

The reason clen was never approved is because it has an inordinately long half life and slow rate of elimination from the body. Clenbuterol concentrations in the body decline biphastically with a ½ life equivalent to 7-9.2hours and then again up to as much as 35-36 hours later. The FDA doesn’t like this and they prefer asthma meds (especially when used for inhalers) to be in and out of the body as quickly as possible. This is the reason Albuterol has been approved as an asthma remedy in the US of A, while clenbuterol has not.

As you may have surmised, that long half-life can also make it easy to detect on a doping control.

Clenbuterol is a performance enhancing drug (PED) but not an anabolic steroid, and as such, has no steroid-like side effects and can not cause virilization  in women. Because it burns fat so well, with no risk of developing male sexual characteristics, it’s incredibly popular with fitness/physique girls and Instagram skanks alike.

The second drug she tested positive for was Oxandrolone, which is both a PED and anabolic steroid, albeit a very mild one.

The oft-repeated bullsh/t in the media is that all anabolic steroids are synthetic testosterone derivatives. It would be far more accurate to say that some are derived from testosterone, while others are derived from 19-nor Testosterone, and that still others are derived from Dihydrotestosterone (DHT). We’re concerned with DHT derivatives here, as oxandrolone is in this family (which also includes compounds like Methenolone, Drostanolone, Stanozolol, Oxymetholone, and Mesterolone).

Dihydrotestosterone is testosterone that has an additional hydrogen bond (dihydro + testosterone), which happens through interaction with an enzyme called 5 alpha Reductase (5a-R). High levels of 5a-R in the womb will turn the fetus (we all start as females in the womb) into a male. In teenage boys DHT is responsible for the development of secondary sexual characteristics (facial hair, etc…).

Oxandrolone, is an anabolic steroid that has an oxygen group at the second carbon position (OX-andro-lone…get it?), and an additional hydrogen bond (the latter making it a DHT derivative, not strictly a testosterone derivative). It exerts its effects (increased protein synthesis, etc…) similarly to all. anabolic steroids, i.e.stimulation of the androgen receptor.  It’s methylated, which means it’s been altered to survive oral ingestion (like Clenbuterol, it’s administered orally). But although methylation increases the strain a compound puts on the liver, oxandrolone is generally considered the most mild anabolic steroid ever developed, with minimal effects on blood lipids. Because it’s already 5a-reduced, there’s no worry about it being further reduced to a more potent dihydro version of itself (like some steroids), and it’s also structurally incapable of aromatization (can’t convert to estrogen).

Again, speaking in broad strokes, this steroid is considered one of the most mild in terms of side effects, especially in women, who would be able to use it at a very low dose and still see traditional steroid-type gains in strength. It’s not considered a great steroid for building muscle, but it’s reputation after decades of use by athletes and bodybuilders alike, is that it’s great for strength,  a bit of lean mass,  and some fat-burning, making it ideal for athletes who compete in lower weight classes, or for whom a high strength:weight ratio is desirable.

Because it’s so mild, Oxandrolone is one of the few steroids still being investigated (other than naturally occurring ones like testosterone), and it’s been approved for a variety of uses (wasting due to diseases like AIDS, short stature due to Turners Syndrome, and for healing burns, to name a few). That mildness extends to its androgenizing effects, and women who keep the dose reasonable will usually not find them to be intolerable or irreversible. That’s the kind of dose I’d expect to see in the CrossFit world, which would be about 1/10th – 1/5th what we’d see a girl using at a local amateur physique show.

However, the mildness of this steroid, while great for women, works against it for men. While Clenbuterol is dirt cheap and readily available, oxandrolone is one of the most commonly counterfeited anabolic steroids, and is also likely the most expensive. For women who might only need 5-10mgs/day to see a boost, that’s fine; but for men who might need 50-100mgs/day, it gets costly.

Whenever speculation in the steroid community turns to female CrossFit athletes, both of these drugs are among the first mentioned (along with Methenolone aka Primobolan and Stanozolol aka Winstrol). None of them are going to cause a ton of side effects, all can be used at low to moderate doses, and are reasonably easy to procure on the black market. Most of us have been wondering why there haven’t been more positives for these drugs…because we highly doubt that USADA caught the only girl using them.