Nobody dreams of growing up and landing a low-paying job in New Jersey making chemicals used in shampoos and hair gels. And on those long, tedious days back in 1991 when a 24-year-old lab technician named Patrick Arnold stood alone in a room stirring thickening agents into smelly vats of goo, there was plenty of time to reflect on the twists of fate that had condemned him to work in a place where “nothing interesting ever happened,” in a job that was “just going nowhere.”
It took months to find the way out, but the path was there in front of him all along. Arnold was an avid weight lifter, cursed with an average build that had long ago stopped cooperating with his efforts to get bigger. Even so, every night after work he would head to one of several gyms where he pumped iron and talked shop with other muscleheads. The conversation would often turn to anabolic steroids. Arnold had majored in chemistry at the University of New Haven, and those weight-room discussions got him thinking.
One afternoon after starting the day’s reactions at work, Arnold marched down the hall to the chemistry library on his floor and looked up the molecular structures of the steroids mentioned in his muscle magazines. Anabolic steroids, which are essentially synthetic testosterone, had only just been declared controlled substances, so there was still an awful lot of information available about them.
It wasn’t long before it hit him: “I hate my job, I’m sitting here, I’ve got a lab—I can try making some of these things myself. No one will even know what the hell I’m doing.” Arnold added the steroid precursors he would need to the regular list of laboratory chemicals he ordered through the company, and nobody was the wiser.
Progress was slow at first. Often he would set out to make a product that he knew should form a crystalline structure, only to end up with a sticky oil stuck to a flask. To Arnold that residue was like a flashing “caution” sign, an indication that potentially toxic impurities and leftover reactants had failed to separate from the brew. But over time he became expert at using solvents to wash the impurities and reactants away, and his compounds increasingly came to form translucent, icelike crystals that indicated a high level of purity.
Arnold’s intellectual appetite grew with his mastery. Soon he was spending 10 hours a week visiting libraries, combing through obscure patents and research journals for compounds with molecular structures worthy of further exploration. Finally he settled on a recipe that he found in a 1930s-era Swiss journal called Helvetica Chimica Acta and translated using a German-English dictionary. It detailed the synthesis of mestanolone, one of the first anabolic steroids ever made. Arnold figured it would make a good first test, since its effects were widely known, unlike some of the more exotic compounds he had come across.
In the lab Arnold watched the greenish byproducts wash out and pure crystals form. When his lab’s mass spectrometer showed a chemical profile identical to the one he was seeking, he dissolved the compound in propylene glycol, an odorless solvent that turned the mestanolone into a liquid. He put himself on a regimen of 75 milligrams a day.
“There wasn’t anything in there that was going to hurt me,” he says. “But I was cautious. I kept the dose at a reasonable level. I didn’t do it for more than a few weeks.”
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. He had also served two prison stints for trafficking in steroids. Duchaine was well connected in the emerging field of gray-market nutritional supplements, products that often pushed the limits of laws regulating steroids. Through a friend, he put Arnold in touch with a Trinidadian entrepreneur, Ramlakhan Boodram, who owned a company that sold soy-processing and farm equipment in Champaign, Illinois, and had manufactured a nutritional supplement for Duchaine’s friend. Boodram was hoping to break into the booming field himself and needed a chemist to develop products for him.
Arnold moved to the Midwest. There, surrounded by cornfields, he set up a lab in an old brick warehouse that was crammed with tractors, metal presses, and oversize mixers used to process soy. He started out with just a few flasks and a hot plate, but eventually he filled his corner of the building with a mass spectrometer, vacuum pump, and all the lab equipment he would need to brew up new substances. Arnold focused his efforts on a patent he came across while flipping through chemical abstracts. It came from an East German pharmaceutical company called Jenapharm, which produced most of the steroidal compounds used in the former communist nation’s athletic doping program.
Jenapharm’s patent concerned a compound known as androstenedione, a naturally occurring testosterone precursor produced by the adrenal glands, testicles, and ovaries. Synthesized andro was widely used in labs as a steroid precursor. But the patent noted that if you administered the hormone orally, the body’s own enzymes would catalyze reactions that would convert it to testosterone, theoretically providing performance-enhancing benefits similar to those of steroids derived from the substance in the lab.
Andro would be potent, easy to make, and possibly legal; after all, Arnold reasoned, how can you regulate something that occurs naturally in the body? Still, he knew it would push legal boundaries to sell something that would turn into a banned substance once ingested. He worried he might get arrested. As an entrepreneur trying to break into nutritional supplements, he decided to take the risk anyway. “Nobody was going to buy vitamins from me,” Arnold says. “When you’re trying to start a business from nothing, you have to have something unique to sell.”
Once andro hit the market, word of its potency spread quickly through the athletic community. Then a reporter spotted a vial of the supplement in the locker of baseball slugger Mark McGwire during the season when he shattered the 37-year-old single season home run record. Suddenly Arnold was famous. In 1998 Sporting News named him number 84 on its list of the 100 most powerful people in sports, sandwiched between sportscaster Bob Costas and superagent Arn Tellem.
Arnold moved to cash in on his renown. He went back to the journals, scanning abstracts for other naturally occurring metabolites that looked likely to be converted into testosterone once ingested. He came out with several more so-called prohormones. In 2003 he and his partners moved to a shiny new 38,000-square-foot warehouse with 30-foot ceilings, 2,000-gallon reactors, and a state-of-the-art research lab with a gas chromatograph and other analytic instrumentation. By 2004 their revenues hit $12 million a year.
Secretly Arnold continued to experiment with illegal steroids. Back in New Jersey, he had come across an anabolic steroid he’d never seen anywhere else, a compound that had been developed by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (now owned by Pfizer) in the early 1960s. Called norbolethone, it had a unique chemical structure that would be impossible to detect, but it also seemed to have many characteristics of the more potent steroids Arnold had tried. Back then, as a lowly lab tech at a chemical company, Arnold could never get hold of the precursor, a prohibitively expensive synthetic progestogen known as levonorgestrel, the active ingredient in the morning-after pill.
One day, talking to a business associate at another nutritional supplements company, Arnold mentioned norbolethone and his problems getting the precursor. Soon afterward, a gift arrived in the mail from China: a package of levonorgestrel. Arnold brewed up a batch of norbolethone, cross-checked the molecular structure with his instruments, and gave himself a mild dose.
Arnold rationalized that the compound 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.
As a side job, Arnold gave phone consultations for people aiming to bulk up, which he advertised on a bodybuilding website. If a client inquired about untraceable steroids, Arnold would send him samples of his compound. “I must emphasize,” he would later say, “that I made everyone aware these drugs had potential long-term adverse effects.”
Just as Arnold suspected, norbolethone was so obscure that professional doping programs had no reference sample and thus could not detect it. It was a brash entrepreneur named Victor Conte who pushed the limits of that obscurity. He ran a sports-nutrition center in Burlingame, California, called the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO). Through BALCO, Conte sold legal zinc-magnesium supplements of questionable efficacy and enlisted topflight athletes to promote them. Among them were true superstars: Marion Jones, who would become the fastest woman in the world, and Barry Bonds, who would go on to break the record for most home runs in a single season. In addition to providing these athletes with supplements, Conte offered up secret supplies of illegal steroids on the side.
Arnold, who met Conte in an Internet chat group, sent him the new compound. Conte rechristened it “the clear” and began distributing it to top athletes. Arnold himself gave the clear to Olympic cyclist Tammy Thomas, whose heavy use would eventually alert authorities to the drug. Thomas ignored Arnold’s dosing advice, he claims, and by 2002 was using so much norbolethone that she had grown facial hair. When her natural testosterone dropped to levels far below normal, testers began to scrutinize her urine. It was only a matter of time before they identified metabolites that led them to norbolethone.
Conte got wind that the authorities were closing in and told Arnold to find a replacement compound. In response, Arnold gambled with a move both rare and bold in underground chemistry: He created an entirely new steroid. To do so, he sat down with The Merck Index, a standard reference manual for chemicals, drugs, and other compounds, and turned to the section on the class of hormones to which norbolethone’s precursor belonged. He hoped to find a different precursor that could be transformed into a steroid using the same molecular processes used to render norbolethone.
Arnold dismissed some because he knew they were associated with steroids on watch lists. Others he knew from experience had molecular properties that would make them weak. 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.
But Conte had a lot of enemies, among them Marion Jones’s former coach Trevor Graham. In June 2003 Graham sent a syringe that contained the new substance to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Once the group had a sample, it was only a matter of time. The authorities closed in and exposed one of the biggest scandals in the history of sports.
In 2005 the Feds raided Arnold’s home and lab. He was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison in 2006. The investigation touched off litigation that lasted through last year, when Barry Bonds was finally sentenced to 30 days of house arrest for obstructing justice during the inquiry.
Today, Arnold insists he is out of the steroid game. Andro and many other prohormones like it have been outlawed by Congress, and Arnold says he is focused solely on legal supplements. To pay fines, he and his partner were forced to auction off their new warehouse with all its top-of-the-line equipment. Today they are back in the old warehouse in the cornfields outside of Champaign, looking for compounds that are distinct from any banned substances to keep them out of trouble.
