Unlike traditional street drugs, or narcotics, anabolic steroid sales adapted quickly to the advent of online marketplaces, stretching back to the late ’90s when they first became available for sale online. Since then, and in contrast to street drugs, the primary method for purchasing anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs, is the Internet.
As this situation unfolded, the majority of steroid websites were divided into “open source” (where anabolic steroids could be sold openly) and “non open source” message boards – the latter of which were further divided into closed source (where the advertising of anabolic steroids was allowed in private forums) and non source boards (where the advertising of anabolic steroids was prohibited). Likewise, the community was divided into those who supported each type of message board.
Open source boards, once the black sheep of the online steroid world, and often considered “bad for the community,” have since become the norm. While mainstream discussion venues like Facebook and Reddit have been known to shut down steroid source talk (most notably last month, when the subreddit of that name was closed), freestanding steroid websites almost universally allow some degree of steroid source advertising and source discussion. Naturally, research and discussion of anabolic steroids is often conducted in close proximity to purchases. In the ’80s this may have entailed asking the biggest guy in the gym what he was on (then asking where he gets it), in the current day it involves the Internet.
Therefore, a recent study on anabolic steroid research aimed to discover exactly what people searched for, when they searched for anabolic steroids online. As the majority of Internet search traffic (87.5%) is conducted utilizing Google (over 3.5 billion daily searches), the company’s own internal data stream analyzer (Google Trends) was relied upon by the scientists conducting research for this study. Also relied upon were previous studies into what anabolic steroids were available for purchase online and user surveys of the most commonly used compounds. Here’s a look at what they discovered: