The End Of An Era, And Patrick’s Movin’ On Up

It’s that time of the month again. Well not that time of the month; I am talking about time for another installment of the Patrick Arnold story. I can’t believe how this goes on and on. I thought it would be two articles at max. I guess I gotta hurry it all up, so I can get back to the science stuff pretty soon. Anyway, here it is.

By late 1999, I had all but stopped hearing from Dan Duchaine. I talked fairly often to his best friend, Shelley Hominuk, and she had expressed concern about Dan’s ever-deepening depression. Dan would make comments to Shelley such as, “I need to visit New York one last time,“ which makes sense in retrospect, but at the time just seemed odd. Then one day in January of 2000, I saw a post on misc.fitness. weights by Will Brink entitled “R.I.P. Dan Duchaine.” I read it and thought it was a joke. I couldn’t fathom that Dan would just die like that and I figured he was up to one of his little jokes to mess with everyone. Dan couldn’t be dead; he always seemed like a cockroach…he could take a lot of abuse, but he would always keep on living.

Apparently, though, Dan had a serious congenital kidney disorder. I had heard about it, but I just did not know how serious it was. That, coupled with an ongoing addiction to Nubain and perhaps other substances probably led to a state of physical, emotional and spiritual despair. What most likely happened was Dan stopped treating his kidney disease and let himself deteriorate to the point of death. Either that, or maybe he overdosed. We will never know. Either way, it was suicide of one sort or another, which is very sad. Shelley found him in his bed a couple of days after he had passed away, and a funeral was set up very quickly. I was unable to attend unfortunately, which sucked.

With the death of Dan, things changed in the industry. Many of my friends at the time were ones I met through Dan, and I soon lost touch with them. There no longer was a “senior steroid guru.” Dan had a way of writing and presenting information in a bold and entertaining way, and I don’t know anyone since who has had that gift. Yeah, guys like me have a lot of knowledge, but we don’t have that literary creativity. Anyway, Dan has been missed and one of the saddest things is that kids today in bodybuilding don’t know who he even was half the time. Not only that, but think of all the stuff Dan has missed. Back then, there were no designer steroids and the prohormone industry still only featured mediocre first- and second-generation stuff. Also, the field of medical muscle research has exploded in recent years. I often wonder what he would think if he could see how crazy stuff has gotten.

At the time of Dan’s death, things were going fine for my company. Not spectacular, but OK. We had come out with a couple of transdermal sprays containing the prohormones 4-AD and nor-4-AD. These actually worked quite well; you could get a very good effect without having to mega-dose like you would need to do with the orals to achieve a similar response. Still though, everyone was selling the same stuff. Sure, there were some new additions such as the DHT precursors, but nothing really outperformed 4-AD, which at the time was the gold standard.

I knew that if I wanted my sports nutrition line Ergopharm to explode I would need to find a new prohormone product. I needed to find one that actually outperformed everything else, rather than just be another compound, which kept the pace. So I hit the books. I ended up in the University of Illinois veterinary library, where I scoured through a book on androgens. It was in German and I don’t read or speak German, so it was not easy. But still, I could understand chemical names in German (sort of) and of course chemical structures needed no translation for me. I noticed the compound 5alpha-andost-1-ene-3,17-dione (1-androstenedione for short) was listed in a table of natural androgen metabolites. I thought to myself that this was a strange and unexpected steroid to be natural, and I wondered if this family of “delta-1’s” as they are called, might be pharmacologically active.

So I drove over to the U of I biology library and went and grabbed the book Androgens and Anabolic Agents by Julius Vida off the shelf. This book, often referred to as simply Vida, was written in the mid-to-late 1960s and is a comprehensive literature review on the science of anabolic steroids. Within it is a table of hundreds and hundreds of steroids, along with their anabolic and androgenic activities, as reported in the published literature. I looked up the compound 5alpha-androst-1-ene-17beta-ol-3-one (1-testosterone for short) which would be the active compound that 1-androstenedione would convert to. To my delight, it had remarkably high anabolic activity.

I then quickly ran around the bio and chem libraries at U of I for the rest of the afternoon (this was before one could just easily look stuff up on Internet databases), collecting all the articles I could find on 1-testosterone and 1-androstenedione. I was doubly delighted when I found out that these delta-1 compounds are somewhat resistant to liver first-pass degradation, which meant that not only was this a highly anabolic compound, but it may have more oral activity than your typical prohormone.

Now the easy part was done. It took only about a day to collect most all of the research concerning the pharmacology of 1-androstenedione and 1-testosterone. Now I had to figure out how to make the stuff. That actually took the better part of a whole year, believe it or not. Of course today, I know how to whip up highly pure 1-androstenedione by a very simple process I have since developed, but back then I had to screw around with nasty, smelly chemicals like bromine and DMF only to end up with a sticky mess that would not crystallize. Countless times I tried the reactions, making modifications each time until I was able to come up with a decent crystalline product.

I tested some of the stuff out on some local guys and they came back to me with raving reports of strength and mass. I could see just by looking at the guys that the stuff was working. However, they reported some not-so-good things like stomach discomfort and burning sensations. It did not take long for me to realize I had to do something to minimize these things, so I investigated making 1-androstenediol, which is another 1-testosterone precursor. Unfortunately the dione to diol reaction (normally a simple one and the same one we used to make 4-androstenediol from 4-androstenedione) was not working right. I was ending up with about 50 percent of a DHT precursor as a side product. After wracking my brain, I finally called the company that makes the chemical reagent used in the process and explained my problem. They suggested I try adding some Cerous Chloride to the reaction and I did. Voila! I got highly pure 1-androstenediol.

I named the product 1-AD and of course it ended up being a huge hit. It not only put Ergopharm on the map, but it revolutionized and revitalized the whole prohormone industry. And since we made it ourselves, we had exclusivity on the stuff for practically a year. Eventually all kinds of people came out with 1-testosterone products, but still the 1-AD remained the best bang for the buck. By constantly working on new ways to make it, we were able to lower cost well below that which China was offering their stuff for.

With the profits from 1-AD, we were able to build our own 40,000-square foot, custom-built headquarters complete with full chemical production facility, well-equipped lab, contract manufacturing production lines and ample office space. We changed the name of our company from LPJ research to Proviant Technologies. We had come a long way, all thanks to 1-AD (and a little bit to 6-oxo as well, which was the first anti-aromatase supplement to hit the market).

Of course researching and developing synthetic processes for products like 1-AD and 6-OXO was not the only thing I was doing in the lab. At off-times and after hours, I would also cook up synthetic stuff such as norbolethone, and I had made some contacts in the amateur and professional sporting world. These contacts were looking for undetectable performance enhancers (steroids mainly) and I was willing to oblige them. I was not looking to make a lot of money; I was mostly just interested in seeing what these things could do for the athletes. And naturally, when a trainer or whomever would report very positive feedback, I felt a sense of accomplishment. I felt that I had made someone very pleased and it almost seemed like a positive thing to me. I did not think too much about the ethical issues at the time, and justified everything by reminding myself that this cat-and-mouse crap was just part of the modern world of sports. I was competing against other doctors or chemists or self-taught gurus out there who were helping the competition.

Not everyone I dealt with was pleased with my work, however. There was this one guy in Europe who worked with a high-level bicycle racing team. I met the guy when he e-mailed me and like everyone else, he was looking for a chemical edge. I supplied the guy with norbolethone and THG, and after trying the stuff out on his cyclists he was extremely satisfied. His team was winning races. One day he told me he needed more, so I made more. I mixed some THG up for the guy in proplyene glycol and put it in a large plastic bottle. Only, I did not use a fresh plastic bottle because I was in a hurry and could not find one. Instead, I took a large bottle that stored some norandrostenedione. I emptied it out and washed it with some methanol and some soap and water.

In retrospect, I could not believe how stupid I was. I knew how sensitive the doping tests were for nandrolone metabolites and I knew that an infinitely small amount of norandrostenedione would give a nandrolone positive. But my impatience and laziness got the better of me and I used the norandrostenedione anyway, thinking that if I just cleaned it out well it would be fine. Anyway, a few weeks went by and then I got an e-mail from the trainer. He was in a panic; one of his athletes had tested positive for nandrolone!! He told me it had to be the stuff I sent him. I told him he had to be wrong; I thought I knew the stuff I made was fine. The next day I got another e-mail; another athlete was positive! He was beside himself with distress. I still denied it was my stuff. Then perhaps two more days went by and I got another e-mail. His entire team tested positive! He told me he was ruined and that his coaching career was destroyed and he had been utterly disgraced. It was at that time that I thought hard and remembered the norandrostenedione bottle. I felt absolutely awful. I tried to help a guy out and I ended up destroying his life. I tried to help him concoct a cover story involving flax oil and contamination, but of course there was no way that would be accepted. I don’t where the guy is today. I hope he didn‘t shoot himself or something.

That’s it for this month. Come back next month for some crazy stuff about BALCO and chemistry and Feds.