WHY IS EVERYONE ON STEROIDS NOW?

Suddenly, steroids and a slew of other performance enhancers are moving out of the shadows and into the fitness routines of a new category of enthusiastic user. Across the internet and in gyms, how did body-modifying drug use become so ubiquitous, so effective, so...normal? And can it really be a good thing?

- ROSECRANS BALDWIN

SOMEONE IN YOUR life is using performance enhancing drugs. I feel comfortable making that bet because I recently discovered how many people in my life are using performance enhancing drugs. Maybe your dad scored human growth hormone at an "anti-aging" clinic. Maybe the woman you met on Hinge just ordered her first "peptide stack". It's definitely the middle-aged white dude at work who calls you brother, who takes beta blockers before presentations-the same guy who texted you about T, testosterone, AKA test, because he copped a vial off a friend and bro, things were wild, he felt crazy, like he could reply to a thousand emails while running through a wall. Brother, you need to check this shit out asap.

My curiosity about this sudden ubiquity helps explain how I came to meet Nick, 33, a handsome white guy, comprehensively tattooed, dressed in a workwear jacket and nice jeans. Nick looks like somebody you'd meet in an expensive coffee shop. It's a look that doesn't suggest, to most eyes, somebody who at times injected himself daily with steroids. Somebody who used to deal them and even "cooked" them in his kitchen. Somebody who once injected himself, Pulp Fiction-style, straight in the chest.

A decade ago, Nick lived with his parents in Southern California and had a day job doing manual labour; going to the gym was his escape. "Training was the only thing I could really do," he said. "I was kind of a vegetable other than when I was in the gym."