Federal Steroid Sentencing Guidlines – just went up again!

Over the past few years, we’ve seen penalties for anabolic steroids getting higher and higher. For all the increased chatter on the Internet, and all of the complaining, we as a group are doing very little about it. Just recently, Congress passed the Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act.

Ryan was a kid who sadly got addicted to painkillers (Vicodin), and overdosed. While this is tragic, it seems to me that a law that broadly covers all prescription drugs that can be purchased online is a bit too broad. Why not actually write a law that addresses this specific problem? Instead, now we’re going to see the maximum steroid trafficking penalties doubling.

Rick Collins tells us:

…the law increases the maximum sentence for selling anabolic steroids (and other schedule III drugs) from 5 years to 10 years (up to 15 years if use of the drug causes death or serious bodily injury)…

For those with a prior drug conviction, the maximum increases from 10 to 20 years (up to 30 years if use of the drug causes death or serious bodily injury)…

(RICK COLLINS)

The part about death or serious bodily injury is actually going to be very bad news for people who sell things like Insulin or DNP, where the potential for serious harm is considerable. As an example, let’s take the story of Sean Zhang, a former moderator from steroid.com (screenname: Dr. Evil).

Sean was caught selling DNP over the Internet after Eric Perrin (screen name: YoungNHugeGunz) died from it’s use. It was all pretty public after BusinessWeek ran an article about it.

Zhang was facing 3 years in prison, because he faced charges for mail fraud [but he (incredibly) continued selling DNP over the internet, and actually received 5 years]. Under the new laws, he’d be facing 15 years, right off the bat, for something he was facing 3 years for previously. Now granted, this is an extreme example, but this is how it seems to be practically applied in this kind of situation (which, granted, is the most extreme one I could come up with).

Let’s talk about another, more familiar example… Dan Duchaine was the biggest steroid dealer in the United States, and partners in a huge steroid smuggling ring, and was sentenced to a maximum of 3 years in prison for his first offense! This was before the Anabolic Steroid Control Act…

Then, he was sentenced to the same amount of time for his second offense (which was again, drug related)!

If he committed those same crimes now (using the internet, of course), The One and Only Steroid Guru would have been potentially facing ten years for the first offense, and twenty for his second time!

One of the partners in Ttokkyo Labs (largest steroid lab in the world at the time) got a 6.5 year sentence…and now, the average Internet source is going to be facing similar time! Honestly, does this sound right to you?

But, as a group, steroid users aren’t really doing much to stop this kind of thing from happening. We’ve seen some real progress with lobbying groups for other drugs (for example, N.O.R.M.L. the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws and M.A.P.S, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies )…but really nothing for steroids. All I really see on various message boards is some bitching and moaning about all of the new laws, but nothing that is really pro-active.

People are willing to stand up and be counted as pot smokers, acid trippers, whatever, but when it comes to steroids, it’s another story. It’s (for some reason) far more acceptable for people to talk about when they were “stoned every day back in high-school” than to talk about the fact that they use steroids, or want to reform steroid laws. All we have is sites where we complain, bicker amongst ourselves, and criticize other steroid users online all day; nothing productive.

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