The suicide of a Texas high school baseball player has raised national awareness about the near epidemic use of performance enhancing drugs.
Parents, teachers and students should take note that back-to-school time can place added pressure on students who might be susceptible.
Students who want to improve their physical appearance, feel better about themselves, or improve athletic performance are candidates to join the almost one million other students who are using them.
What many parents and teachers may not know is that these drugs, known as anabolic steroids, are not just being used by athletes any more. It is estimated that about half of the users are “mirror athletes.” These users want to “look like” the athletes do, but have no interest in competing on the athletic field.
Fast Growing User Group: Young High School Girls
While about 7% of male students use them, trends show that the fastest growing user group is young high school girls, according to Drug Free America.
Taylor Hooton, of Plano, Texas was a 16 year old, 6’2”, 180 pound normal high school student. He was very popular and had many friends, he was an honor student who was making plans to go to college, he had involved parents, he was a Christian and attended church regularly, and he had a girlfriend.
But he also was an athlete with a big secret - he was injecting himself with anabolic steroids. Taylor wanted to compete on the baseball team his senior year had been told by a coach that he “needed to get bigger” in order to reach his goal. So he decided to take a short cut. After all, fully half of the other guys on the team were already doing it.
Taylor put on almost 30 pounds of lean muscle in about 90 days. Soon, he descended into a deep depression and on a July day in 2003, Taylor took his own life.
The Taylor E. Hooton Foundation was established a year later by his parents, family and friends when they became aware of the magnitude of a growing problem among high school students across the country-the illegal use and abuse of anabolic steroids and other appearance and performance enhancing drugs. They also learned that young people and their parents are generally unaware of the real dangers of these powerful drugs.
One Million Kids
The amount of U.S. students admitting they have used these drugs is about 5-7% and is growing. Experts conservatively believe the number is somewhere between 800,000 to one million kids.
These numbers do not include those kids that are unknowingly ingesting anabolic steroids that are found in some dietary supplements. Two recent studies have revealed that about 20% of dietary supplements (of the sort used by athletes and bodybuilders) are contaminated (spiked) with anabolic steroids.
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