http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2434-i-made-candy-out-illega...

One day, in the glorious future, all steroid use will be legal, and professional sports will consist solely of twisted teams of mutants bashing each other to death with superhuman strength. But for today at least, steroids are illegal, so of course, nobody uses them -- much less our esteemed and noble professional athletes. Shockingly, our source for today's article, Marty, disagrees with that last statement: he ran a mobile steroid manufacturing lab for about a year. He was part of an international network of professionals, all collaborating to help the 'roidiest guy at your local gym get 'roidier and 'roidier until his heart eventually explodes. This is Marty's story ...

5
How To Start A Career In The Illegal Steroids Industry

"I worked for a steroid dealer in New York. Look up the steroid bust of Ryan Root."

Press Connects
We know you're far too lazy to Google. We'll do it for you.

"I was cooking steroids for him at first, but when he got busted, he decided to go clean, so I started making pure form protein for him." Marty also made a drug called hordenine, which comes from barley and elevates blood pressure, along with Phenethylamine, a psychoactive which does double duty as a stimulant. He explained, "If you take them together, maybe a gram of it ... it gives you a very mild amphetamine high. Great for working out."

vinaturae.com
We assume this is the only way anyone has the energy to exercise.

Finally, he manufactured Nandrolone Phenylpropionate. NPP is a powerful steroid: "You'll put on 20 pounds [a lot of that is water weight] ... and grow breasts, but [to stop that you take] breast cancer medicine."

Sounds like a grand idea! Root was eventually busted, and his arrest sent Marty cruising the internet for a new gig,

"I got on the site e-roids ... a completely illegal list of sites you can buy steroids from. It's the Yelp of steroids. Anyone can get on it."

eroids.com
"My testicles look like smooshed roaches! Good packaging, 9.8/10."

Through e-roids, he found a steroid manufacturer whose products he liked.

"I emailed the owner, gave him some bullshit about being patriotic (because he said something about discounts for veterans)" and offered some free advice on web design. "He said, 'you're pretty smart ... do you want to get to work on the web? I'll get your leg working again.'"

That's not weird steroid slang: Marty happens to be missing one leg. Prosthetic legs cost $5,000 on the low-end. He built the steroid dealer's website, and said dealer got him a new fake leg, "and then he said, 'hey man, you kinda owe me for that leg.'"

sand86/iStock
"I might have to reclaim it. Plus interest."

"'You gotta start cooking gear.' So I started cooking gear out of a Motel 6."

'Gear' is weird steroid slang. It means steroids. OK ... Maybe it's not that weird.

4
The Pay Doesn't Work How You Might Think

Life as a steroid cook is downright feudal: "They paid for all my living expenses, food. Hotel. Medical. And then maybe $500 a week. But like if my car broke down they'd fix it. It's less of a payment and more, we'll take care of you. Don't pay for it, just wait there. [My boss] fixed my tire, took my car to a black site garage ... forged my tags [so I didn't need to get a registration]."

Marty actually loved the carefree nature of cooking steroids as a virtual indentured servant. And, particularly, he loved how well the lifestyle fit his Tinder career: "I'm a bit of a ho, I like Tinder a lot, so it paid for my Tinder benders."

Tragically, Marty's social life was limited by the fact that he couldn't leave his hotel while there was gear inside it: "You use wall locks, that ball that screws in over the door. It won't stop a police officer but it'll stop anyone else. But it necessitates you being there all the time. Keep your blinds drawn."

vitapix/iStock
Don't request maid service -- that's a rookie move.

I asked what else he loved about the life, and he said: "The serenity of knowing that everything you need is taken care of." It's like having a drug pimp.

But Marty wasn't just in it for the subsidized stranger fucking and free La Quinta points. He truly cared about his work, and he spent hours researching how his customers responded to his gear:

"By nature ... you gotta go online, see what they're saying about your products. The guys shipping it were fucking up bad. It'd take you six weeks to get your product ... on e-roids they'd say it's great gear, killer gear, but it takes forever to arrive."

Unsplash/pixabay
"Testicles are reinflating! Ship faster, 5/10."

He spent "Maybe an hour a day" checking for product reviews on e-roids. He was frustrated by his employer's shipping problems, but proud of the love customers had for his product. Hey, taking pride in your work isn't a crime. It's really only the illegal drug manufacturing that's a crime.

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3
The Steroid User Community Is Shockingly Well Organized

"You'd be shocked at how much of the bodybuilding and weightlifting community is based on steroids. If you see a bodybuilding competition, they're on gear ... You can't get that big without help. Period."

Steroids are illegal, and it'd be impossible to objectively confirm this fact. But it's proooobably worth noting that many bodybuilders wouldn't dispute our source's claim.

Iron Man Magazine
There's a reason every locker room has a syringe disposal bin.

So, say you're convinced that steroids are a good decision for you, and you desperately want to become one of the angry, red-faced, veiny men who make America's gyms so insufferable. The first question is: Should I take my drugs orally, or shoot them up? The second question is: Why am I such an asshole, and is there anything I can do about it?

Only God and self-help books can help you with the latter, but as for the former, Marty says: "When you take oral steroids it's much worse for you."

DEA
And it may be the only oral you'll be getting.

"[But] if you inject into your blood you'll taste copper and have this cough, tren cough, that can send you to the hospital."

Tren stands for trenbolone acetate, a powerful steroid Marty started cooking for his new boss: "If you're in bodybuilding today you'll be doing trenbolone ... it's 500 times stronger than testosterone." You can expect 10-15 pounds of muscle gain in eight weeks on trenbolone, but the reported side-effects are pretty vicious:

MuscleTalk.co.uk
Sometimes, you hack up little chunks of bicep.

As for steroids and their long-standing, complex, will-they-won't-they relationship with assholes, Marty, of course, had a horrific 'roid rage story to tell us:

"My old roommate, he was on tren and he couldn't handle it. One night he was trenned out ... He was at a bar with his girlfriend ... decks her in the jaw, bartender knocks his jaw sideways ... kicks him out of the bar, on his way out he sees his girlfriend run to her car with a friend ..." and then runs his girlfriend down and starts "stomping on her head."

She survived, which is about the only good thing we can say about that story.

Hey, let's talk about candy!

2
Before You Know It, You're Going Global

"We made jellies and candies for a while. We were the bad guys you hear about on the news, ... 'putting drugs in candy.'"

East718/Wiki Commons
Great for Halloween kids who want to dress as the Hulk.

Marty's tenure as the candyman began when his boss got a wild urge to start shipping and selling their steroids mixed into Jolly Rancher-type things. (Copyright law isn't huge with illegal drug dealers.) When Marty found out, his eager-to-please self set to work cooking up a test batch:

"I cooked a huge batch of [Jolly Ranchers], we used Kool-Aid, I put it in bowls and put up a Wickr image and he said, 'Holy shit ... you got $1000, what do you need on Amazon?'" Yes, all the key fixtures of Marty's cooking process were bought from Amazon.com. What, you think drug chemists don't love two-day shipping? Everybody loves two-day shipping.

josemiguels/Pixabay
Not overnight shipping though. Let's not go crazy now.

Soon they scaled that side of the operation up, and now it's big business. Marty didn't have a birds-eye view to the whole operation, but the parts of it he saw pointed to something sprawling and massive: "[the raw steroid ingredients] came from China, mostly giant factories. There's a lot that comes from Ukraine because they make steroids mostly for medical use, especially testosterone."

He's not going to elaborate too much on the upper management:

"The ring in the U.S. was 28 people, that's just cooks. I have no idea about the big side. I didn't want to know about that side. Those guys are dangerous, they kill people. My boss was a former Navy SEAL. He was so huge he looked like a Ninja Turtle."

Hans/Pixabay
All records on him went into the shredder.

And, according to Marty, showing his current employees pictures of people he'd made dead was his preferred 'motivational' strategy,

"He preferred to use a hatchet. He chopped people up. He had one guy, he buried it halfway in his head -- the guy fucked him out of a bunch of money, and he killed him."

sand86/iStock
Shit, we weren't expecting to use this photo again.

That seems like shoddy criming to us, but Marty claimed their phones all came from Ukraine, and were anonymized: "You don't have your own number [when someone receives a call from you] it says number unavailable." For added security, they all used Wickr, a super secure messaging app that's great for journalists interviewing sensitive sources, and also, apparently, drug dealers. We have so, so much in common.

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1
What Happens When You Get Busted

One night, while doing a rather rare and incredibly potent psychedelic called DOC, Marty freaked out: "it gave me a bad tremor in my stump."

poco_bw/iStock
Though that may also have been the termites.

He called 911, and the cops already staking out his place used the opportunity to do cop stuff.

"They'd been posted up ... watching the house with binoculars ... the police came, saw a bag of weed," and then they had probable cause for a full on search. They "opened my safe with a blockbuster," and found nearly a kilogram of assorted steroids.

pederk/iStock
He could have told them the combination, but they REALLY wanted to try out that bomb.

The DEA talked with Marty briefly, but "they have bigger fish to fry. I'm not worth their time." He's currently living in a men's shelter, waiting to see what charges, if any, will be brought against him. But even though he lost everything, which actually seems like mostly Tinder benders, Marty didn't seem to regret his time in the 'roid business.

"Full disclosure man, I wouldn't take it back."

Robert Evans writes about the seedy world of Internet drug dealing and provides guides to recreating insane ancient drugs in his book, A Brief History of Vice.

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