Dymethazine

Q: What do you think of the designer steroid Dymethazine? Is it any good? Is it really less toxic on your liver and heart than other oral steroids like Dianabol or methasteron? I am looking for a safe, legal steroid.

A: I think I can tell you a few things about dimethazine (the correct spelling of the generic drug). Let’s start with the background. First, dimethazine (also referred to as mebolazine in some papers) is an old Italian steroid. It was sold beginning in the 1960s by Ormonoterapia Richter in Italy, and also under license by Lepetit in France. It was used medically for a variety of purposes including the treatment of wasting, the promotion of fracture healing, and increasing height in underdeveloped children.

The drug is specifically a methylated form of drostanolone (methasteron, commonly known as Superdrol) bound to another of the same molecules with the use of a hydrazine bridge. In the body, dimethazine will be broken down into two molecules of methasteron. For all intents and purposes, dimethazine is a Superdrol product.

On a milligram-for-milligram basis, dimethazine it is about twice as potent an anabolic as methyltestosterone. It possesses about the same level of androgenicity, so that its overall balance is much more anabolic than androgenic. Dimethazine also does not aromatize, so it is not prone to causing water retention. Overall, you can expect significant gains in muscle strength and size, hopefully without significant fat or water gain.

With regard to your other questions, I don’t see any advantage in dimethazine. It is going to be considerably toxic to your cardiovascular system, just like other potent orals. This means it will suppress HDL (good) cholesterol levels very strongly. Bad cholesterol levels (LDL) are also expected to increase. Additionally, dimethazine is going to be significantly toxic to the liver, just as methasteron is, so I would not use high doses or long periods of intake.

Dimethazine is not a ‘modern’ steroid, as it has been out of commerce for decades now. We also haven’t seen any significant research on the agent since the late 1960s. Clearly the medical community abandoned it long ago, likely because it was never a commercial success. As such, it is not possible to get a modern grasp on its medical toxicity and effectiveness. But we do know enough about its general and structural properties to make the judgments above.

I would not recommend dimethazine if you are trying to find a very mild and safe steroid. I can say, however, that it is the only OTC designer steroid currently available that was ever once sold as a human pharmaceutical. This gives some sense of comfort, albeit small. In short, the drug still must be respected as you would any other very powerful oral steroid.

Conte and Designer Steroids

Q: I think Victor Conte took a shot at you on MD radio. He was commenting that ‘designer steroids’ can’t be used anymore, and that the ‘supposed expert’ on the radio show before him didn’t know what he was talking about. On the previous week’s radio show, you were talking about how designer steroids could still be used. So that must have been you. Who is right, you or Conte? Are designer steroids all detectable now?

A: No, designer steroids are not all detectable because of the BALCO scandal. I think Conte is mistakenly under the impression that because the testing bodies have uncovered THG, Madol, and Norbolethone, that the secret may be out about designer steroids in general, so to speak. The uncovering of these designer steroids makes these specific drugs unusable in sports, as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) testing labs are now looking for them. But the same imperfect testing methodologies remain in place with WADA, with the drugs tested for in a compound-specific manner. This means that if they are not familiar with the compound in question, and it doesn’t share metabolites in common with the drugs they are looking for, they will not find it.

You need to remember that the urine is filled with a myriad of different byproducts of metabolism. Your kidneys ultimately excrete a good percentage of everything you ingest. You can’t just point at a urinalysis report and say, “Wait a minute, this doesn’t look right. This compound shouldn’t be here.” There is simply way too much noise for that. This has always been the principal limitation to a compound-based testing approach.

If we look more basically, we find that the concept of a designer steroid is not new to WADA at all. In fact, Oral Turinabol (chlorodehydromethyltestosterone) was arguably the first designer steroid widely-used in competitive sports. You may recall this was one of the secret ‘doping’ steroids of Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War. Oral Turinabol use went on undetected for years before the testing bodies were aware of it and began looking for it in urine samples. So the sports agencies actually had their first exposure to the designer steroid phenomenon decades ago, and were well aware of the potential for cheating in this manner all along. During this time they made many changes to their testing protocols, but none were able to prevent THG, DMT, and norbolethone from creeping into sports in the modern era.

If you closely followed how WADA and its affiliated labs responded to these latest scandals, you found many reports specific to these drugs— but again, no changes to the testing protocols that would prevent another designer steroid from being used in the future. Until such time as there is a major breakthrough with testing, designer steroids will remain the theoretical thorn in the side of WADA and other sports organizations.

Fortaplus Stanozolol

Q: I’ve enclosed an empty box of stanozolol called Fortaplus. It is made in Paraguay by IMEG. Is this real?

A: The best I can tell from the empty box is that your product is real. Fortaplus a fairly new stanozolol product, at least as far as its regular availability on the black market is concerned. With authorities in developed nations being more and more active in reducing steroid diversions and smuggling, dealers have been increasingly forced to look toward new markets where bulk orders can be obtained with less red tape. A number of countries in South America are turning out to be growing markets for anabolic steroid exports, Paraguay included.

The company IMEG is actually one of the human product divisions of a larger pharmaceuticals conglomerate called Guayaki, known in South America for its line of common generic (though privately-branded) drug products. IMEG makes a few dozen different drug products in total, all of them used in other areas of medicine.

Fortaplus appears to be their only anabolic steroid offering at the present time, although one wonders if this will change as the company sees success with the product. As with virtually every steroid product, counterfeits are likely to follow as Fortaplus becomes more popular among bodybuilders. For now, it appears to be (at least for the time being) low on the counterfeiting radar.

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