Trafficking in Bodily Perfection: Examining the Late-Modern Steroid Marketplace and Its Criminalization

Illicit steroid and human growth hormone use by professional athletes has received significant media and political attention in the last five years. The resulting political pressure has compelled federal law enforcement to prosecute serious new control initiatives. To date, no academic research inquiring into the nature of this illicit industry exists. This study fills this void through the mixed methods approachemploying both ethnographic field research and quantitative content analysis. The ethnographic data demonstrate a fascinating late-modern trafficking scheme where the central informant established an apartment-based manufacturing operation, converting raw steroid chemical compounds ordered off the Internet into injectable solutions. Content analysis of 186 websites that supply anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) demonstrates that these grounded findings are indicative of a much larger phenomenon. Our final analysis examines the broader theoretical relevance of the ethnographic findings through contextualizing them within macro-structural (supply) and macro-cultural (demand) social forces.