Ask a tough question, get a tough answer: what can steroids do to you?

Want to get scared? Read this. It's an e-mail from a young man in the Midwest. I had asked him to tell me about his experiences in our Steroid Age.

OK, here goes, informal, hope that's OK.

One of my buddies did steroids (juice) for a year on and off. Before he started, he was a good kid everyone loved to be around. After, he beat the crap out of his girlfriend daffy, beat up everyone else smaller than him and started in every illegal activity from theft to con scams.

I used to powerlift and bodybuild. About 85 percent of the males at my gym used steroids. A long list of professional athletes and bodybuilders frequented the gym and got their stuff. You could always find someone that had a bottle of testosterone or winstrol.

Half the guys, and a few girls, went completely nuts? Always getting into fights and trouble with the law, when before using the junk, they were good, honest kids. Yep, kids--about 30 percent of the roid users were under 20. Why? Because the "big guys" are doing it, and there's nothing wrong with it, especially if the pros are doing it.

One guy committed suicide after beating his live-in girlfriend. Me, I used for four months, only four months? After I had already been a good powerlifter, natural my whole life. So why did I use, even after seeing the B.S. other guys went through? Because you don't see it when you are in that arena! You only see the positives, like being able to lift more weight than 20 people put together. The pump, the power that is experienced is greater and more addicting than anything I have encountered.

Many guys will do anything to feel that way, I mean anything! After using for only four months, my personality changed. I became depressed along with all of my buddies, I lost a lot of hair, my testes shrunk, my moods became uncontrollable. So I stopped completely. Well, it didn't end there. After a few months, my testosterone level was lower than a little girl's. My hormone levels were so messed up that I went even more nuts (no pun intended).