This is a story about social change. But the first thing to admit is that you're not in the Olympics. You're not riding the Tour de France. You're not, even as a hobby, being asked to pee into a bottle at random moments. You're not going to be, you know, actually cheating at anything. The second thing is, well, you're getting old. And you've been looking around on the internet, and found there are things you can buy that might help. Performance enhancing drugs. Steroids. Not legal, per se, or even advisable. But they're there, you can order them, there's rather a lot of advice around as to how to use them, and no one is going to offer you, a non-professional athlete unconnected with international sporting events, anything other than compliments if you do.
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As anyone who has considered the gym knows, it's from small things that big things grow. It's the same with social change, or the adoption of ideas. All of the ideas in this issue are predicated on the idea that society will adopt them. There would be no point discussing them here if we didn't think they'd come true. But how they come true is a different matter. There are lots of theories to explain the take-up of ideas. Some are gradual and some are sudden. Some come from new circumstances, others come from old concepts just kinda running out of energy. This is the latter. We're all getting old - and so perhaps is our view of performance enhancing drugs.
Once seen as the preserve of the freakishly buff actor or the cheating athlete, they're now perhaps seen as only doing circuits at the more extreme end of the healthy eating spectrum. It's not that much of a leap from isotonic drinks to protein shakes, and then through testosterone supplements - the advertising for which is an increasing mainstay of American media - to full-blown anabolic steroids. And once you're counting your steps on a Fitbit, you're already in the mindset of maxing out your personal bests. And, little by little, society alters its views.
By necessity, too: we're getting older. A gym-goer in his early thirties is today likely in the "sandwich" generation - between the declining health of the baby boomers, and the ever-growing demands of ever-growing children. It focuses the mind, and for a generation happy at combining existential angsts, skilled at Googling, and a historical willingness to buy packets of unmarked pills, you get views, gradually, beginning to change.
Then there's the hype. Shredded. Muscular. Powerful. Firm of fetlock and revived of vim and vigour: the sort of drugs that enabled Lance Armstrong to be really good at riding a bike are, nowadays, not only easy to order online, but in popular culture, in our post-factual society, they don't seem to have done anyone any harm. Sure, there was the social disgrace among those giving their medals back, but these are drugs that allowed a man who nearly died of cancer to go on to win the most difficult athletic event in the world for years thereafter. For middle-aged men staring in desperate hope at the third coffee of the morning, that's a pretty impressive kicker. Maybe not for you, but you can see how others might get on board.
Rep by rep, set by set, ideas change. And that's how it seems to be. Look around the gym boards, the YouTube channels, the bro-science forums, and you'll find increasing numbers of young and middle-aged dudes - almost always dudes - researching drug stacks, sharing links to medical studies, swapping tips and theories. What was once a closed, secretive, crushingly-tightly-held world in the darker corners of concrete floored gyms is now open for anyone to see. At the same time, where human growth hormone and testosterone shots were once the preserve of the genuinely ill and the psychotically competitive, clinics from Beverly Hills to Beirut are offering their well-dressed clientele the same, re-badged as elite "anti-ageing" treatments. A manicure for the endocrine system.
So these steroids, supplements, hormones and shots are being moved into respectability from two sides. They're sold at great expense and glamour at the one end, and available to the curious, with their own Bitcoin-y illicit charm at the other. After the Olympics, with athletes banned from their life's ambition for association with chemicals freely obtainable online starting the conversation, with the tired middle-aged wanting to get themselves into shape quickly, with social media offering support and science-y advice, this is the prediction: by the end of 2017 you, or someone you know, will have used an illegal drug to get fitter, stronger, or hotter. A new, buff, banned from competition you, just in time to talk about implants this time next year.
Ben Hammersley is a contributing editor to WIRED, an author and a TV broadcaster
The WIRED World in 2017 is WIRED's fifth annual trends briefing, predicting what's coming next in the worlds of technology, science and design
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
