When Zachary Coleman, vice president of the University’s Powerlifting Club, competed in powerlifting at the high school level, he claimed many of his peers used performance enhancing drugs to get stronger faster.
“I would be competing against people who were openly on PEDs,” Coleman said. “There was no way I could beat these people without using these drugs.”
However, if any member of his collegiate powerlifting team — which is preparing for a national competition in April — is found to be using PEDs, he would be disqualified from competition, according to Powerlifting Club President Conor Sullivan.
A recent poll conducted by Zogby Analytics concluded that 8.2 percent of young men ages 18 to 25 have used PEDs like Coleman’s competitors, and an additional 27.8 percent knew someone who had.
Coleman, who was not surprised at the polls findings, said he felt pressure to use PEDs such as human growth hormone or anabolic steroids to keep up with his competition.
“Steroids are the quickest way to unlevel the playing field,” Coleman said.
Instead, Coleman has taken creatine supplements, a natural alternative, for the last eight years to boost his performance.
All athletes in the Powerlifting Club are tested for drugs and if found to be using PEDs, they lose all awards and are banned from the federation in which they compete, Sullivan said.
“In our federation, it isn’t very often that an athlete tests positive for these drugs,” Sullivan said. “It would make LSU look bad and have a negative effect on the team when we went to other competitions.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, a leading research hospital’s website, HGH is used medically in patients who have hormone deficiencies or diseases that cause muscular atrophy, and must be administered via injection. Anabolic steroids work similarly but are synthetic versions of testosterone.
Both drugs, the Mayo Clinic reported, can increase muscle mass, decrease body fat and increase exercise capacity, which is what attracts the use of them by athletes. Anabolic steroids can have serious side effects including higher risk of joint injury, mood swings and kidney and liver problems.
The findings of the Zogby poll also showed that while 35 percent of young men thought PEDs were potentially life threatening when used without doctor’s supervision, more than 20 percent believed them critical to enhancing performance.
Seventy-seven percent of those polled believed the use of PEDs in pro sports placed more pressure on young athletes to use drugs to “get ahead.”
Digital Citizens Alliance, a coalition that educates consumers on Internet safety, conducted a study and found that for every one to two professional athletes exposed for illegal steroid use, thousands of young men are doing the same thing.
In its report, Digital Citizens alliance said a simple Google search returns hundreds of links to suppliers of illegal PEDs and that teens order these drugs online to administer them to themselves at “epidemic” levels.
Creatine, the supplement used by Coleman, has increased in popularity since the 1990s, and is widely considered a safe, natural way to increase athletic performance despite its being banned from distribution by the NCAA in 1998, the Mayo Clinic stated.
“Creatine I would not consider cheating because it is found in a lot of foods,” Coleman said. “You’re really just isolating a nutrient and taking it in higher doses than you would otherwise.”
Coleman said the current investigations into NFL and MLB players use of PEDs negatively affects young men who look up to the professional athletes.
“You follow a role model like Alex Rodriguez for 10 or 15 years, and you want to be everything they were,” Coleman said. “Then you find out that they’ve been taking PEDs the entire time, the only way they got where they were was through that avenue.”