Julia Child on the Juice
Or, how not to do kitchen chemistry
By Bill Roberts

So, you don't know where to get nice, genuine pharmaceutical steroids? Concerned about "sting" operations by pesky DEA agents? Worried about the local zit-riddled gym freak selling you bad stuff? Is that what's troubling you, Bunky? Faced by these problems, you might have a brainstorm:

"I know! I'll do it myself, in my kitchen! After all, if you want something done right, ya' gotta' do it yourself, right?"

Luckily, or not-so luckily, there's no shortage of advice on how to do it. Furthermore, there's no shortage of supply, either, since there are all kinds of folks selling steroid-containing cattle implants. You can see it now, Rod Serling intoning:

"Your next stop — The Hugeness Zone."

With visions of lust-crazed heifers chasing your implant-enhanced bod, you break out the ol' saucepan and try out the latest kitchen-chemistry advice. The trouble is, which recipe should you follow?

Unfortunately, most of these renegade recipes are written by people who just don't know what they're talking about. Ask them what a beaker or flask is for, and they'd probably have no idea, although I'm sure some would assume that they're used for bizarre sexual scenarios. Much of what they say is just plain wrong. Worse, they've never verified the validity of their procedures. I've yet to see where they've sent the product of their "purification" process off for analysis, so they have no way of knowing if they really purified their stuff or not. Any legitimate chemist can tell you that you always have to analyze your product to see what you've synthesized.

So we're going to look at some of these lunatic ideas and see where they fall short. Maybe in the process, you'll get some information on how one might be able to do all of this safely. I wouldn't recommend it, though. But, with that said, on with the show!

Finaplix-H

This cattle implant contains 20 mg of trenbolone acetate (TA) per pellet, with ten pellets per dose and ten doses per pack, for a total of two grams per pack — a lot of anabolic horsepower. But that's not all. It also contains a filler which is insoluble in oil — sort of a gritty, sandy material — and a binder or glue that holds it all together.

As Billie Bob Redneck so patiently explained in his Moo! article from Issue 49 of Testosterone, you inject this-here stuff — binders, filler, TA, and all — into the ears of your cattle to make them grow faster. 'Course, them cattle don't have to live real long after this implant, just a few months. So no one really knows how this stuff affects the cattle in the long run. Plus, no one really cares what happens at the site of implantation. And the dose per pound of animal is very low compared to what bodybuilders want to use.

So are the binders safe for human injection? I don't know. Their use in livestock doesn't prove to me that they must be safe over the long term, at the site of injection if injected repeatedly, or at the doses used by bodybuilders. If I knew what the binders were, then I could give a better answer. However, no one in bodybuilding seems to know.

With that in mind, I'd personally be wary of injecting them and would want some way to remove them.

Now, Billie Bob disagrees with me on this. He was hard to get in touch with — you'll recall that after bulking himself up with Fina, he won the local 4H show and was summarily slaughtered. But somehow I got an email from him anyway, objecting to my concerns about safety of the binders. He insisted:

"But we eat the cattle, and the ears are used for dog chewies! So if the binders were bad, they wouldn't be allowed."

Uh...okay, Billie Bob. He might be right, or he might not. Your call.

Anyway, on to the reported methods of illegally administering Finaplix to humans (and it sure as heck is illegal).

The guru speaks

Dan Duchaine launched the Finaplix craze with a pioneering article in Muscle Media 2000. Ah, the excitement and headiness of those days! Dan said that all you had to do was dissolve Finaplix pellets in hot methanol, run it through a coffee filter to remove the filler and binders, evaporate off the methanol, and obtain "pure crystals of trenbolone acetate." Voil?!

But I don't think that Dan ever tried this. Here are some problems:

• The methanol not only dissolves the TA, but also the binders.

• The formula calls for far more methanol than necessary.

• Hot methanol is a fire hazard — a very serious fire hazard. In the presence of a flame or spark, fumes from hot methanol are easily ignited. And where are you going to heat your methanol? On the stove, right? Hey, you may get away with it, but make sure that you paid the insurance this month and the family is out of the house, okay?

• The binders love to clog up filters, so you may not be able to get your solution through. This might be possible with a really coarse filter, though. But people have reported getting only a little methanol through, then having the remaining mess stay in their filter. I should also mention that even though the binder clogs up filters, a lot of the binders manage to get through.

• Ever try to evaporate off 100 ml of methanol? If you don't have a way to put it under vacuum, you have a problem...unless you don't mind waiting days or weeks.

The result of this will be a solid, at best, which contains both TA and binders, as well as probably dust and dirt. A coffee filter simply can't strain these out.

And what to do with this solid? Dan suggested applying it to the skin with DMSO. Well, to explain the problems here, I need to explain how human skin protects from having your insides ooze out and from having outside stuff ooze into you.

A new layer of skin cells is grown every day, down in the living part of the skin. This pushes up the older layers, which are either dying or already dead. The dead ones have transformed themselves into hard, stiff "bricks" of keratin. This material is almost impermeable — nothing is going to go through it easily.

Around these bricks is a "mortar" of very thin, alternating layers of waxy material and water. This outside layer of the skin is called the stratum corneum. To get an idea of the structure of this layer, picture the "mortar" between the "bricks" as being a hundred times thinner than the bricks. For things to get through the stratum corneum, they have to diffuse through the mortar, working their way around the bricks. This is hard to do, and relatively little material can get through each square inch of skin under normal conditions.

This allows the TA to get through the skin, but what you're doing to the skin is rather brutal. On a one-time basis, no big deal: that spot of skin will have completely regenerated itself in a week or so. Of course, on a daily, long-term basis, it's pretty rough on the skin. Imagine scrubbing kerosene and sand into your face with a loofah. That'll give you a good approximation of what DMSO-delivered TA will do to the skin over the long run.

By the way, athletes who use topical DMSO for its own sake don't take the same amount per square centimeter as athletes who use it to deliver TA. In other words, they typically don't take enough to either damage the skin much or be effective as a transdermal carrier.

Besides the harshness on the skin, you'll also develop bad breath — rather like garlic breath — by doing this. I knew a lifter who quit after just two or three days on transdermal Fina because guys at the gym were catching one whiff of his breath and saying, "Oh, you're using Fina, huh?" This pissed him off because he didn't want people to know that he was a steroid user. Also, he wasn't "getting any" because of the bad breath. Hardly worth it.

Despite all of your trouble, you don't get too much out of it. I've consulted with a few dozen people who have tried transdermal Fina. Most quit soon, and those who don't generally report little results. And you always get a few who rave about anything, even placebos like Cybergenics, so I don't take the few exceptions too seriously. These lifters don't follow the Duchaine method, but instead simply dissolve the pellet into a small volume of DMSO. This is much more convenient and offers no real disadvantage compared to the methanol/filtration method.

I rate Duchaine's method:

Convenience: A
Safety: B-
Effectiveness: D
Miscellaneous: Your breath will smell like swamp gas, and you won't get laid in the coming millennium.

I'm judging the safety based on how this delivery system affects the human body. If, however, you blew up your kitchen — and yourself along with it — safety would have to drop to a "D" rating.

Injectable TA

To prepare an injection, several things would need to be accomplished. The TA must be dissolved in oil, and the filler and all small particles (including bacteria) should be filtered out. The aforementioned binders would preferably be removed.

Now, the advice that I have seen on this is pretty wild stuff. The dumbest of all had it that you should wash Finaplix pellets with acetone. This would supposedly dissolve the binders and filler, leaving pure TA behind. (Alternate versions of this method used ethanol or other solvents.) You'd discard the acetone, and inject the "TA." Uh, there's just one teensy problem: what's actually left behind is the filler! And the acetone that you discard will contain all of the TA. Next, please!

Why not try to wash out the filler and/or binders with water, as recommended by some "gurus?" Well, at least this won't dissolve your TA. The problem is that it won't remove much binder, either. Generally, all you'll end up with is a mess, accomplishing nothing.

The above methods have to get an "F" rating, of course.

There's also a kit that you can buy to make injectable TA. I almost couldn't believe it when I saw the website of a guy selling it! He describes an entire procedure for you. The key step has you dissolving the Finaplix pellets in the "magic dissolving liquid" that he provides. Yes, magic dissolving liquid! I'm not kidding. You then filter this, add it to oil, and inject the resulting mixture of Finaplix, oil, and magic dissolving liquid. Perhaps you're a trusting soul and are perfectly happy to buy "magic dissolving liquid" from some guy named "Animal" (or whatever) and inject this into yourself. Me? No way.

I'd guess that this "magic dissolving liquid" is methanol. If so, he's having you inject 0.1 ml methanol for every 1 ml total solution that you inject. I don't recommend doing this. Besides, I have a real ethical problem with people who sell things for human consumption (let alone injection!) but refuse to divulge the product. "Trust me!" only goes so far.

Filtration is likely to be extremely difficult due to the tendency of binders to clog filters. The method won't remove much of the binders — most will pass through the filter and be injected along with the TA.

I rate the injection method as follows:

Convenience: C
Safety: C at best (it's impossible to rate the safety of "magic dissolving liquid")
Estimated effectiveness: A

There's an alternate approach that doesn't involve any unknown substances. Thoroughly crush 100 Finaplix pellets and add 40 ml of vegetable oil (Wesson soybean oil seems a good choice). The loosely covered container holding the mixture is heated in a water bath to about 190 degrees F. The container should be left in the water bath for about half an hour, and the contents swirled occasionally. After a half-hour, tighten the container and shake it vigorously until it seems that the pellets have broken up and only sand — and perhaps "gummy" material — remains. It may take a while for the pellets to break up, but it's okay to set it down and take rest breaks. Continue shaking it for short periods of time (until you get tired). If the pellets still seem partially intact after cooling, repeat the procedure.

Allow the contents of the container to settle for at least a day, then draw off the oil and store it in another container. If anything but "sand" (filler) remains at the bottom, save it for when you make your next batch.

The new container, in turn, is heated and then allowed to partially cool to about 130 degrees F, after which the contents are transferred to multi-use vials.

This is the procedure that I heard about, anyway, and it's worked for some folks. One drawback is that most — or perhaps all — of the binders will dissolve into the oil and, therefore, will be present in the injection.

I rate this vegetable oil method as follows:

Convenience: C
Safety: B- (could be much worse if there are any screw-ups)
Effectiveness: A

As mentioned, the above method fails to filter the product. Filtration through a submicron filter, followed by heating and transfer to multi-use vials, would improve the safety rating but greatly reduce convenience as filtration would be very difficult (or so I'm told). This reduces convenience to a "D" rating.

Another variant of the procedure involves adding 4 ml of benzyl alcohol to 100 crushed Finaplix pellets. A day or so is allowed for the pellets to mostly dissolve (periodic shaking is a good idea). The same procedure outlined above is then followed, except that you would use 36 ml instead of 40 ml of oil.

Again, you could increase the safety rating to "B+" by using submicron filtration. Of course, this would only be valid if you avoided screw-ups, and there's no guarantee that any particular individual will find this or any of these methods safe at all. In fact, there's a high risk that the opposite would be true.

Severe problems can result if anything is done wrong. Examples include local infection or even anaphylactic shock. After all, how many people can really call their kitchen a "clean-room environment?" Hmmm...

One should realize that it's a real risk to mess with anything like this, so I don't recommend it — not just for legal reasons, but because these methods really do have practical problems, and injecting impure products carries a very high health risk.

You say that you want to "play it safe" and remove all of the binders? Well, possible methods to remove the binders must be considered beyond the scope of "kitchen chemistry," so there's really no advice to give. If you want something that's of pharmaceutical quality, the best bet is (what else?) a genuine pharmaceutical steroid. The second-best bet is a quality ""gray-market" item. Your own handiwork is, at best, a distant third — unless you can honestly say that you have a lot of experience in this and have facilities tailored for it. I sure wouldn't use this stuff.

More products, more problems

By the way, trenbolone acetate pellets are also sold as Finaplix-S. This is the same as Finaplix-H, except that the amount of TA is only 14 mg per pellet instead of 20 mg. Another available brand is Revalor. But this contains estradiol, which would be difficult to remove. So, unless you like having a lot of estrogen to go with your trenbolone, I'd "steer" away from this product.

Injectable testosterone propionate

Implus-H and Synovex-H each contain 20 mg of testosterone propionate, along with 2 mg of estradiol benzoate, per pellet. As with Finaplix-H, there are ten pellets per dose and ten doses per pack.

The first thing to understand is that this is an enormous amount of estrogen. Suppose that you wanted to take 100 mg per day of testosterone propionate (TP). If you went the cattle implant route, 20 mg of estradiol benzoate will come along for the ride with each 100 mg of TP. Well, a full hormone replacement dose for a woman is about 1 mg per day. Can you say "DD?"

Obviously, you'd want to remove better than 99% of the estrogen. And the Internet chemistry geniuses (somehow, none of them hold degrees or jobs in chemistry) have no shortage of ideas on how you can do this.

Furthermore, there's an obvious shortage of actual testing to see if their methods really do remove the estrogen. Well, who needs to actually test to see if a brilliant idea worked? Nah, just inject the stuff! Gyno surgery only costs about five grand. Why worry?

The first brilliant idea is to "wash out" the estrogen from the pellets with water, acetone, methanol, or some other solvent. This won't work. Nothing will dissolve out the estradiol benzoate (EB) while leaving the TP behind. Organic solvents, such as acetone or methanol, will dissolve the TP even more easily than EB. Water will do nothing, really, since both TP and EB are practically insoluble in water.

The other brilliant concept is to dissolve the TP in acetone, methanol, ether, or some other organic solvent, leaving the EB behind. The problem with this idea is that no organic solvent will dissolve TP while leaving EB untouched. You'll always have a significant percentage of dissolved EB. Obviously, the folks recommending these methods have various ways for you to get this TP/EB mixture into oil and inject it into yourself.

I rate this "estrogen wash out" method as follows:

Convenience: C
Safety: F (high risk of gynecomastia)
Effectiveness: A

These "expert" advisors have either neglected to mention or, more likely, don't know that there's a genuinely reasonable method to separate EB and TP. Three words should suffice for those who actually have enough chemistry experience to perhaps use this information safely: supersaturation, selective recrystallization. Enough said. While this would improve the safety rating considerably, it would be even more inconvenient because it entails legitimate chemistry procedures.

Convenience: D
Safety: B (again, any screw-ups can make this extremely dangerous)
Effectiveness: A

Now, some "gurus" have given the separation problem a little genuine and valid thought, realizing that if the esters were removed from the steroids — yielding testosterone and estradiol — these probably could be separated from each other. Again, both are soluble in organic solvents, and both are practically insoluble in water, but there's a trick. Estradiol will react with a strong base, such as sodium hydroxide, to yield the sodium salt of estradiol, which is soluble in water. Therefore, one might be able to extract the testosterone into an organic solvent, such as ether, and the estradiol benzoate into alkaline water. Maybe. Might.

I know one person who tried this and, admittedly, that's a pretty small sample. But he was a pretty sharp guy. He found that more than half of the testosterone was lost in the process, and the remainder was kind of nasty, having turned yellow.

My guess is that the sodium salt of estradiol acts just like a bile acid — a steroid molecule that's actually quite similar. What you have here is a molecule that's largely hydrophobic (avoids water) or oil-like, but one end of the molecule is very hydrophilic (prefers water). These can cluster together into spheres and present the hydrophilic end on the outside, into the water, with the oil-like parts on the inside. Any kind of oily or waxy material can then be carried on the inside of the sphere (micelle).

This is how bile acids dissolve fats and steroids in the GI tract. The same thing might be going on here, allowing the sodium estradiol to carry away a lot of testosterone into the discarded water.

Exactly why the testosterone was "nasty," I don't know, but you might well get the same result were you to try this ill-advised procedure.

Convenience: D
Safety: F (purity of resulting testosterone is suspect)
Effectiveness: ?

Conclusion

There are, quite obviously, many lifters who use cattle implants. I know some personally and have consulted with others. I only know two who have said that their kitchen-chemistry efforts have left them feeling ill. None of them have died...yet.

So what's your safest bet? See your physician and get a legitimate prescription for real anabolic steroids. Hey, that's old-fogey advice, but it's the only legal way and safest for your health. If that can't be done, I'd recommend prohormones before kitchen chemistry. Even with the current primitive prohormone "technology," you can give yourself a significant edge if the doses are large and frequent enough. And, if I may blow my own horn, things are about to get better with prohormones.

Still, if you've just got to go in the kitchen and play chemist, I hope that the above warnings of what "not to do" will help you avoid making mistakes.

Bon appetit!

About the author

Bill Roberts has written for Mesomorphosis, Peak Training Journal, and Dan Duchaine's newsletter, and only rarely mutilates cattle.