The Problem with Steroids in Mexico

The law of the underground dictates that you have a better than average chance of finding Mexican steroids among the gear being offered for sale out of some dude’s gym bag in the US and Canada. The gear I’m seeing here in Guadalajara is among the same gear you’re looking at there, and it’s all shit. I’ve never seen more little guys in tank tops covered in zits as I’ve seen in my gym in Mexico. Everybody thinks they need to be on a “cycle” if they work out, and they have no idea what they’re doing except for what the drug dealer tells them, and they have no idea what’s in the product they’re taking because it’s mostly all fake—imagine that scenario. On top of that, they don’t check their blood work, they don’t go off, a lot of them do orals instead of injectables, 95 percent of what they’re taking is fake, they don’t eat right, they don’t drink enough water, and they don’t train right. They also have no concept of pain and intensity. Just look at the drama queens who play soccer. They stub a toe and act like it was chopped off at the knee. Imagine doing a strip set to failure.

Of course some guys at the top of the rank and file of Mexico’s best bodybuilders don’t fit into this category; however, they’re few and far between and not too far out in front. In the entire history of Mexican bodybuilding, only one Mexican bodybuilder has ever competed in the Mr. Olympia, and he got 16th place along with eight other guys who didn’t place. Despite Mexico’s paradisiacal environment for bodybuilding, the country isn’t churning out international bodybuilding champions, let alone an Olympia contender. Why?

After having been deeply involved in Mexico’s bodybuilding culture here for several years and having coached more than a few athletes, I’m going to go ahead and say that perhaps the biggest impediment the Mexican bodybuilder suffers is, ironically, his drug supply. When I was buying Mexican and European steroids from the farmacia in Puerto Vallarta during the early to mid ‘80s, it would have seemed incomprehensible that these simple little inexpensive transactions would one day move away from the security and surety of an over-the-counter purchase (with a credit card, no less!) at a legitimate pharmacy to the proverbial trunk of a drug dealer’s car in the gym parking lot. And in that trunk: a plethora of underground gear bearing all kinds of labels from all over the world, none of it pharmaceutical and almost none of it real. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what has happened.

Not only is 95 percent of what the Mexican steroid dealers selling fake, the farmacia has also ruled itself out. Once a great depot of affordable and plentiful gear from global manufacturers, the pharmacy today is practically out of stock and priced out of sight. The Mexican government —probably because of pressure from the American do-gooders—has drawn down the availability of many formerly common bodybuilding drugs. Today, you can’t even find Primobolan—a West German staple in Mexico for decades—in the drug store. Today, in Mexico, every injectable medicine—including steroids—is made in Mexico. In the case of steroids, every injectable is dispensed in 1 mL single-use ampoules (or preloaded syringe) and none of it exceeds 250 mg/mL. Deca comes only in 1 mL preloads in 50 mg/mL doses (two to a pack)! And, with the average price of steroids being about $23 per cc (double that for Deca), the whole deal isn’t bodybuilder-friendly at all. Can you imagine spending $360 a week on Deca? In Mexico?! That’s like spending $25 in Manitoba for a bag of ice!

In light of the foregoing, the steroid black market in Mexico—and, for that matter, much of Central and South America—is ripe for a legit underground lab to set up shop and produce real, bodybuilder-friendly drugs at reasonable prices. And, so far, the operation would be totally legal. As long as none of it gets shipped to the US—personal smuggling is inevitable and doesn’t count—no one will bother you. At least not right away. Once you start making billions of pesos, you’ll have to spread some around, but that’s technically unavoidable anywhere. However, with more than 40 million people inhabiting just Mexico City and São Paulo, Brazil (the Americas’ two largest cities) and steroid attitudes throughout a very body-conscious Latin America on par with that of nutritional supplements, there will be plenty of business to go around.

With this logic in mind, several enterprising Mexican businessmen set out to fund various underground labs to capitalize on this vast steroid market. Unfortunately, their business acumen fell off the back of a turnip truck. I know of at least two unrelated operations and how they are working firsthand. So, not only do I know that what I’m about to tell you is true, it’s also a testament to the attitude for which this country is famous.

The first operation works like this: Pedro Pica-Piedra sets up a lab, buys raw material from China, and starts making steroids. His first batch is the bomb—overdosed, the bottles overfilled, and everyone is raving about it. He sells out of his first run and then cooks another. Only this time, instead of overdosing the batch, he cuts the raws by 25 percent, under-fills the bottles by a quarter cc and unloads the new weaker (but much more profitable) batch to an unsuspecting public that thought they were getting the first stuff. Then, upon cooking the third batch, Pedro cuts the raws by another 25 percent. He does this again and again until the people using it grumble loud enough, and eventually the formerly great product is known on the street as weak and under-filled, and it disappears. It’s immediately replaced by a new batch, by the same lab operating under a different name, with a different label, and the process starts all over again. It’s a progressive rip-off that ends up doing more for the acne treatment business than it does for the steroid business.

The second underground scam being run here is what I call “steroids labeled to order.” I know a guy doing this out of an old laundromat—his shelving is the tops of the old washing machines! What this character does is buy thousands of unlabeled 10 cc bottles of 25 mg/cc testosterone enanthate from a contract manufacturer and keep them in inventory. When he gets an order for Primo, he sticks Primo labels on the 25 mg/cc test bottle. If he gets an order for Deca, the test bottle gets a Deca label. Tren? You guessed it. He pushes this crap as long as he can until the complaints outweigh sales. Then he scraps that label and prints another one with a different name and starts the process all over again.

The logical question you are probably asking yourselves right now is why anyone would buy that crap in the first place as opposed to either what’s available at the pharmacy or the black market dealers who import legit pharmaceuticals from Europe, the Middle East, China, India, and Pakistan. Of course, the logical answer is price. But here is what they don’t understand: They can buy real trenbolone hexahydrobenzylcarbonate (Parabolan) for 1,100 pesos for a box of five amps (1.5 mL, 76.5 mg) from Alpha Pharma, a legit pharmaceutical brand from India. Their street option, for about the same price, is about 20 different brands of Mexican underground lab Tren hex that comes in a 10 cc bottle at 100 mg/cc and is obviously BS. But, in the hands of the zitty kids in my gym, the BS brand looks like a great deal, so they go for that, some of them knowing full well the underground stuff is bunk! They use it anyway!

Indeed, the steroid evolution in Mexico has followed a curious and circuitous route to an unconscionable end. There’s a pretty good influx of real European pharma gear, but it’s expensive, and you can never count on your dealer having a consistent inventory—I’ve been waiting for that amazing Parabolan from India to come back in stock for two months so far. The standard response I get when I ask my guy when more is coming in is “Mañana,” which doesn’t mean “tomorrow” as the standard translation would dictate; it literally means “sometime, possibly, maybe, it could happen one day in the future.” The pharmacy has priced itself out of the game, the availability of imported pharma gear is unreliable at best, and the underground labs exist to rip off as many people as possible with fake crap. See the problem?