It was a beautiful September afternoon when my flight landed in San Diego. At first I didn’t even know if I would make it. I’d heard the horror stories about the notoriously difficult appraoch into Lindburgh Field, this compounded with my manic fear of flying and the fact that this was going to be my last assignment before I retreated for a four week sabbatical made me unusually jumpy. At every “thud” or “bump” my pulse quickened and I felt that rush of adrenaline not unlike that felt when one is in a near auto accident. Perhaps my distress was visible, because the old bag flight attendant approached more than once to ask if she could bring me anything. I have to admit, three vodka and tonics later my fear of flying was greatly alleviated and I was feeling pleasantly buzzed. In fact, the old bag started to appear more attractive after all, I thought perhaps I had rushed to judgment.

I was revieving a file which I had compiled over the past three weeks on the man which the bodybuilding community affectionately calls the “guru.” I had begun compiling all the info I could after my editor informed me that the SOUTH FLORIDA TIMES (the small publication at which I’m currently employed) would be doing an expose on the bodybuilding lifestyle. Apparently the mysterious figure known as the “guru” was responsible for many of the bizarre practices followed by physique enthusiasts to achieve, what is in their estimation, physical perfection.

What I discovered about the “guru,” a/k/a Dan Duchaine read like a novel. It truly read like a fiction story. The story of a misfit, loner, with a genius IQ, then the felony convictions, the stroke, and finally recent affluence and notoriety as the expert on all the nasty “tricks of the trade.”

In just a few short hours I was to meet and interview the guru for my piece and I was genuinely intrigued by this man. I had read numerous columns of his which were published since 1992 in a bodybuilding magazine called MUSCLE MEDIA 2000. MUSCLE MEDIA 2000, or MM2K as fans refer to it, is one of the leading periodicals for those interested in how to build bigger biceps and powerful pectorals. The magazine is typical of what one would expect, pumped-up guys and gals, scantily clad, in a variety of provocative poses, not the sort of thing you’d find while waiting in your dentist’s office. In between these exciting photos of healthy young bodies are evoacative ads for products such as HMB, PHOSPHAGAIN, ULTIMATE ORANGE and NEUROGAIN–a product which promises enhanced cognitive skills.

My research revealed that Dan Duchaine has a vested interest in a company known as NEXT NUTRITION, a company which markets several bodybuilding supplements. These products intrigued me, after all, I’d heard of designer jeans, but never had I heard of a “Designer Protein” and I was interested in having the guru enlighten me. NEXT NUTRITION also markets ULTIMATE ORANGE, a pre-workout drink which promises some quite extraordinary gains in strength. I couldn’t help but smile when I read the rather cartoonish ad copy for ULTIMATE ORANGE, it simply evoked an image of Bill Bixby consuming a serving and turning into the muscle bound hulk, Lou Ferrigno.

I jotted down some preliminary notes that I simply must ask the guru about these products and how he seems to have knowledge about building muscle and burning fat that no one else possesses.

At this point, my flight had arrived and I was in the limo and on my way to meet the guru at, what I thought was an unlikely location, a HOOTERS restaurant. I had read that the guru enjoyed his solitude and appeared in public as little as possible, which was apparently just the way he liked it, thank you very much.

I arrived at the restaurant at a little past noon, and I recognized the guru from the magazine ads in which he appears for ULTIMATE ORANGE (the Incredible Hulk formula). The guru was busily chatting with a busty young HOOTERS waitress with long red hair, and who looked like she was at least half his age.

After the initial introductions, I got down to business immediately. I asked the guru how he seemed to be omniscient, to possess an innate knowledge about which compounds can produce dramatic effetcs in muscle size and strength. The guru began, “well, that’s really not something I feel comfortable discussing here, perhaps we should go somewhere more private.” I agreed, he began to reach for his wallet, but I insisted on paying the tab, expressing that it was the least I could do in return for the insight which he might impart on me.

We headed out to the parking lot, under an absolutely beautiful Southern California sky, and the guru gestured toward his car. I expected perhaps a Mercedes Benz or a Cadillac, but instead the guru had well-used mini-van with over 150,000 miles on the odometer. After a little prodding, the motor started and we were on our way.

We arrived at an absolutely beautiful condominium complex right on the beach, with access to some great bike paths. It turns out that the gurus real interest lies in bicycles, not bodybuilding.

In the guru’s rather spartan condo, decorated with photos of past and current bodybuilding champions who were all essentially thanking the guru for his part in their success in achieving bulging biceps and striated gluteas maximus.

In one corner stood a drafting table with what appeared to be plans for some revolutionary new bicycle. The guru immediately noticed that I was stealing glances at his designs, and without saying a word he obscured his plans with a few dog-eared and possibly cum stained copies of JUGGS and BUSTY BEAUTIES magazine. “It’s a never before seen design,” the guru stated, “so you can understand my concern.” I replied that of course I understood and had no intention of peeking into that which did not concern me. Then he continued, “these bikes take a little getting used to at first, but those who have tried them swear that they’ve reduced commute times while avoiding the sexual disfunction which is common with ordinary bike seats, that’s all I can tell you right now.” “Fair enough,” I said, “I’m really more interested in how you’ve been instrumental in designing these bodybuilding products.”

“Right,” the guru stated, as if his memory had just been jogged back from his thoughts about his innovations within the bicycle industry. “You’re interested in how I arrive at these particular formulations and how I have a knack for being right most of the time,” I nodded in response.

The guru invited me to have a seat, the he started, “please call me Dan, the moniker ‘guru’ was given to me by the New York sports writers, and to be quite honest, I’m not particularly fond of it.” “Alright, Dan it is.

At this point, Dan began rummaging about his kitchen as he spoke, in one hand he had a plastic jar containing DESIGNER WHEY PTROTEIN, in the other a container of QUAKER INSTANT OATMEAL. He began mixing the two together in a microwaveable ceramic bowl. “Richard, you’ve heard of the ZONE, haven’t you?” I nodded in agreement. “Well, it’s kind of like that. You see, I can ‘see’ things that other people can’t see.” “Precognition,” I asked. “Yes, perhaps you could call it that, but there’s something more. I can actually SEE what works and what doesn’t. I can instantly tell you if an athlete is in an anabolic or a catabolic state, I can tell you when proteolysis is occurring or if an athlete is in positive or negative nitirgen balance.”

“How,” I asked.

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t really know HOW or WHY, it just happens. Mostly involuntarily, but recently I’ve found that there are factors which seem to precipitate an episode of ‘higher awareness’ as I like to call it.”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes, I can just close my eyes and concentrate on that inner voice, I reach a state of bodybuilding nirvanna. Hah, I like that term, be sure to use that in your article.”

“I sure will!”

“Anyway, these ideas seem to come to me from some area of my subconscious, and when I awake I often find the formulation for some new bodybuilding discovery scrawled on a piece of paper. But what’s most bizarre is that the words will be in an unrecognizable handwriting, one which is seemingly unaffected by the apoplexy due to my stroke.”

“That’s incredible,” I exclaimed.

“Yes, and It scared the shit out of me the first time it happened.”

“I’ll bet it did.”

DING! The bell rang on Dan’s microwave and his piping hot “Designer oatmeal” was ready to eat. Dan took the bowl and sat across from me at the breakfast nook in his kitchen. “Any chance you could try to reach ‘higher awareness’ while I’m here, it would be strictly for scientific purposes of course. Perhaps I could even witness the natural bodybuilding breakthrough which would replace steroids.”

“HAHA, that sounds too much like an ad for the latest EAS supplement, maybe you should try your hand at copywriting!” Dan stated with a sardonic smile.

“Really,” I urged, while Dan stirred the marzipan goop in his bowl which emitted a cinnamony aroma not unlike maple syrup. “Maybe you could tell me how I could improve my bench press,” I said in jest.

“Alright, but we have to first get a few thing out of the way.” Dan began clearing the kitchen table of all objects, he then placed a yellow legal pad and a pen in front of him on the table. “Oh yes,” he said, “one other thing,” he then went over to the window, closed the blinds, and turned the ringer off on the phone. He then turned to me, “you understand that I must have complete silence, and absolutely no distractions.” I nodded in agreement. “Alright, let’s give it a try.”

Dan sat very upright in his chair, his palms resting flat on his thighs, he closed his eyes and sat very still. I couln’t help but think, “this is a bunch of crockery, I bet this guy wants me to believe that he sits in the lotus position and levitates too.”

Then it started. His eyes opened wide, only his pupils had rolled-up, so only the white of his eyes was visible. I thought, “cute trick, any half-assed fortune teller can pull the same routine.” Then, he began to tremble violently, and he started to mumble. Spittle began to coagulate at the corners of his mouth, then he began mumbling in a voice which was foreign to that of his normal elocution.

Dan then grabbed the pencil and beagn scrawling studiously on the pad, his eyes continually staring straight ahead, and his whole body trembling as if it were a marionette being operated by an unskilled puppeteer. I glanced down at my watch to try to get some perspective on how long this episode might last, I was frightened, to say the least. However, my watch had stopped, I thought perhaps I forgot to wind it, when I looked about Dan’s kitchen and noticed that both the clock on his microwave and his oven were no longer working, same for the VCR, certainly there was some higher force at work.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door, and Dan closed his eyes, when he opened tham again his pupils were visible, the trembling and muttering stopped and I knew he was back, and I was quite relieved at that.

“See,” Dan said, “I doesn’t always work.” What’s that I asked, gesturing toward the scribbling he had made on his pad. It appeared to be a diagram of a testosterone molecule with some other assorted notations. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, grinning from ear to ear like the Cheshire Cat from Alice In Wonderland, “I wonder what we have here.”

TO BE CONTINUED

I think it’s safe to say that the entire bodybuilding industry simply isn’t the same without Dan. Not only did he bring a brilliant and inquisitive mind to the entire industry, he brought a sense of humor and attitude that I think is missing these days. Oh sure, others try to live up but nobody seems to quite capture the magic that was Dan Duchaine.

Granted, he did step on a lot of toes but this has to do with the fact that he refused to bullshit anybody; he told the truth (as he knew it) and didn’t care what anybody else thought. If that pissed people off, that was their problem.

Most people tended to think of Dan as reckless or without scruples, but I didn’t agree. I remember talking to him extensively the first time I hung out with him. He was clearly very concerned about the potential effects of everything he talked about. The health of his athletes and the people he consulted with was always at the forefront of his mind even if it didn’t always seem that way.

Dan was always his own guinea pig on everything. If anybody was going to be possibly harmed in some way, it was going to be him first and foremost. At the same time, as I said, he didn’t pull any punches. He felt that his duty was to bring the information to the public, what they did with it was sort of their problem. He presented the facts.

I think one of my most memorable events with Dan stems from the first trip I made to San Diego to hang out with him. I was in Southern California for some reason and bopped down to SD for a few days. Dan was nice enough to put me up in his apartment and put up with my endless stream of questions. During that trip, Dan told me about a diet product he wanted to develop called the P&S pill. The ingredients included a mild thermogenic (lobelia), a couple of diuretics, and cascara sagrada which makes you ‘poop’. I was confused, and figured this had to be a precontest bodybuilder thing to clear out the GI tract and eliminate water. Dan had told me no, that it was for general dieting purposes mainly for women. Dan had pointed out that women love to see the scale go down, and because of this, in his words, they just loved to Piss and Shit (hence P&S pill). Frankly, I couldn’t argue with him but that is representative of both his wicked sense of humor and overall attitude. Dieting, he knew like the back of his hand, and bodybuilders sought his advice to get their extremely low body fat percentages from around the world.

There was also another trip where he told me that, given his choice, he’d get out of the bodybuilding industry entirely and just build bikes (he had a fascination with recumbents). After years of being at the top of his field, it was pretty clear that he didn’t enjoy it very much anymore as the changes at Muscle Media had really extracted his intelligence and character from his articles. He also wanted a family and children more than anything but circumstances prevented that from ever occurring.

A second story is from a time when Elzi Volk and I went down to San Diego to visit Paul Chek (to see if he could help her with a long standing injury issue). After that visit, we were to meet Dan who lived in Carlsbad and Shelley in San Diego for lunch. Well, things ran a lot longer at the Chek Institute and even though I made sure to call to let Shelley know we were running late. Dan was simply livid at how late we were and he read me the riot act. Shelley found the situation to be quite comical because according to her, she never seen Dan so pissed off before. Apparently, it was all because he had something better to do than to wait around for some Chekies who were not only wasting their time, were now wasting his!

As a final story I’d like to tell involves the year of Dan’s death. As it turned out, he passed away approximately 4 weeks prior to the Arnold Classic bodybuilding show and expo (arguably the biggest US expo at that time). This had meant that none of the magazines had time to let anybody know about his death because they are usually printed months in advance. I bring this up because I was at the show that year and, as usual, Dan was supposed to hang out at the QFAC booth with Shelley and her posse of hot chicks. Instead, I ended up spending most of my time at the show there (trying my best to fill impossibly large shoes and reduce the stress that Shelley was dealing with, and yes of course, to flirt with the girls).

I think that situation more so than any other, really pointed out how much of an influence Dan had has on people. I say that because I ran into an innumerable number of people who had made the trip to the Arnold Classic to see Dan, usually because he had helped them out (for example, one guy reported how Dan helped him kick a rather nasty Nubain habit) in the past. He may have come across as an unbearable all-knowing prick in his articles, but he was as willing to help people out as anybody I’ve ever seen. The look on those people’s faces when they found out he had passed away told the story as far as I was concerned.

Dan Duchaine was a man at the top of his field, who could have easily become just another high priced guru who only answered questions for money. Instead, he was a man who would go out of his way to help people as much as he could. He was the one who started the concept of the Guru consultations, and according to Shelley, no other came close to his sold out appointment bookings!

Without Dan, I daresay that the industry as it stands would be much different. It’s certainly a different (and far less humorous or interesting) place since his passing. I can’t say that I always agreed with him, but I did respect him. Like many, I suspect I owe my career to him and I certainly miss him.

“Ahhh, but wait until you ride one.” -Dan Duchaine

When he first coined that little phrase, he might well have been referring to a big, veiny muscled chick, or perhaps a post-op transsexual, or a dwarf – even then nothing would have surprised me. But, really, he was talking about recumbent bikes, of which his particular design looked like it was destined to be the guru’s next claim to fame. He was also intrigued with, and well informed about, high-end audio equipment that was as intricate and precise as it was insanely expensive. He designed his own pair of complex multi-chambered speakers and had them custom built specifically to enhance every invisible nuance that made an angry lesbian – his favorite brand of performer.

But his real love was the theater– that was his college major – and, at the time of his death, Dan was writing his first screenplay inspired by a recent two-month stay in New York’s theater district. Some of you might find it hard to believe that I’m talking about the notorious Steroid Guru Dan Duchaine, the same guy that used to roar down the streets of Venice, Calif., in a 427 Cobra replica with his hair on fire; but I am. Now, almost nine years after his death, I still find myself wondering, daily, about my friend; what we’d be talking about today if he were alive, and what he’d have told me had I made it up to New York that last time he so vehemently implored me to visit. I think he knew he was dying.

That’s why there will always be that rock in my stomach that keeps reminding me I should have gone to see him. It also keeps me thinking about him and remembering what it was like to have him as a part of my life. People I meet who knew we were friends always, invariably, ask me what the Guru was like. Recently, someone wrote me suggesting I pen my memoirs of the time he and I spend together. Compiling the details would required doing them justice; these memoirs would be encyclopedic, and perhaps someday I’ll get the chance to sit down and spill it all out. But, for now, closing in on the ninth anniversary of Dan’s death, it would at least be cathartic for me to talk a little about the life of one of bodybuilding’s most influential people.

In Step with a Genius
We met in 1989 while we were both guests of the federal government in one of their “desert country clubs.” Each of us knew who the other was because we knew a couple of the same people around Venice, and we saw each other at Gold’s Gym. Plus, I’d read his book, the Underground Steroid Handbook. But, we never really spoke until our unique association with the Mecca of bodybuilding required that we’d instantly become training partners in the joint. We gradually realized, however, that the only intellectual stimulation we were ever going to get while corralled in that place was from each other. So we ended up convincing ourselves that walking laps around the prison camp and up the hill to the air traffic control tower was adequate cardio, so long as we did plenty of laps. So, between two workouts a day and God knows how many laps, we hit every subject imaginable; not just drugs.

Soon it dawned on me: Holy shit, this guy is a genius. He didn’t just know about a bunch of steroids. Dan was like a freak’n scientist when it came to metabolic pathways and hormone cascades and interactions of various drugs. Most of the ancillary drugs we use along with our steroids today are only used because of Dan Duchaine. Nolvadex, Clomid, HCG, Clenbuterol, metformin, GHB, Cytadren, ionamin, pondamin and Fastin, to name but a few, were drugs he either proposed we use, or whose use he perfected. Unfortunately, he has also been blamed for a drug many bodybuilders abuse and are addicted to today– Nubain.

Not long after we got out, we ended up sharing a wall in an apartment building on Vernon St., right around the corner from Gold’s Gym, at the very beginning of the freak movement in bodybuilding. This was the dawn of the Dorian era and this Mr. O was giving us the first glimpse of where we were headed. At that time, bodybuilders were throwing caution to the wind, and training with painkillers became the thing to do. Dan spoke forlornly about Nubain in prison. He told me about how smooth the high was and how relaxing. He also mentioned the sneezing, fatigue and headaches you got when you ran out. And he told me it was thermogenic (that sold me); it helped kill your appetite and it was perfect to train on because you could really go deep into the pain barrier– just the thing for training while contest dieting. Dan’s thing was to wake up in the morning, take all his steroids, and various other drugs and stimulants, and a shot of Nubain. Then he went back to bed and waited for his eyes to pop open when the Fastin kicked in. Bam! Then, off to the gym.

The day he got out of the halfway house, Dan knocked on my back door. I was up on a ladder painting my ceiling, so I told him to let himself in. He walked into my kitchen, looked up at me and said, “Get down off there, John; you shouldn’t be up on a ladder when you do this.” He held up an insulin syringe that had just 1.5 units in front of the plunger.

“That’s Nubain?” I presumed.

“It’s not insulin,” he said smugly.

“No, what fun would that be,” I said, trying to make light of what would be a life-changing experience.

He motioned for me to get down. I felt a knot tightening somewhere in my guts as I got off the ladder and we sat down at the table. He laid the syringe down in front of me and I picked it up. “So, I should mainline this, right?”

Dan grinned and began a recap of all the bodybuilders who used it and how the drug’s effect was influenced if it were injected into fat, muscle, or intravenously. The consensus was that hitting a vein was definitely the preferred route if you wanted the rush. I held it up and looked through the little bit of liquid as I twirled the syringe between my fingers. Holy shit, IV drugs– bloated heroine junkies, puking, purple, dead on the toilet. Images of anti-drug propaganda flowed through my mind as I pondered the actual mechanics of what I was about to do. I looked down at the veins popping out of my forearm just begging to be poked, and then back up at the syringe. I had no idea how to do this. “Will you do it for me?”

“Don’t be such a fuckin’ pussy,” he spit back at me. “Just make a fist, point the pin up toward your body, and slide it in. You’ll feel it go into the vein. If you see the syringe fill with blood when you pull back on the plunger, you’re in.”

“I knew that!” I said rolling my eyes. I didn’t know how to make myself do it.

“Don’t tell me you’re having a moral dilemma because of the delivery method,” he said. “A drug is a drug.”

Since a hypocrite I’m not, the needle slipped right in and in five seconds I felt like puking. Once that dissipated, I felt pretty good– just like he described. The next morning I did another hit before we headed out to the gym and I had an amazing workout. And so, my three-year battle began. I eventually won mine. I don’t think Dan ever won his. I don’t even think he really tried to fight it. Did Nubain contribute to his illness? Is that one of the things he was going to tell me in New York? I’ll never know.

What many of you don’t know and probably won’t believe is that Dan didn’t even really like bodybuilding. He once told me during an interview, “The funny thing is that I don’t even care about bodybuilding as a sport. I don’t follow it; if there’s a bad decision at a contest, I don’t care. My delight is solving problems; they happen to be centered in bodybuilding. If someone poses a problem and I solve it, but they say the solution is immoral, that’s not my problem. It’s your sport; you deal with it. I mean, if a natural bodybuilder asks me to help him, he’s got to know that I’ll also be helping his competition pass the test. Both are interesting problems: One is to extract maximum performance without cheating, and the other is how to cheat.”

This acumen was unique during that era, and as such, an endless parade of bodybuilders, powerlifters, Olympic athletes and various actors and entertainers passed by my window on their way to the Guru’s door. They paid handsomely for the information you couldn’t get anywhere else. There were also the weirdoes. Between him, me and the chick who wrestled schmoes next door, we were privy to a cross-section of humanity that few would believe exists. Mike Christian once said that he wanted to plant himself in a lawn chair in our front yard just to watch the show go by.

Then there were the babes. At the time, we were both single, bodybuilder chicks were in style, and there was an endless supply of them convinced Dan could unlock the secret of their success. They were right. There were so many that Dan took me under his wing and made me his protégé to handle the overflow. Unlike the men we worked with, the women took the advice we gave them and followed it, and they appreciated it. Dan admitted that for some of the most avant-garde things he tried– metformin, injectable Lasix, vanadyl sulfate, dilantin, Clenbuterol, Fastin, etc.– the women were all docile human lab rats, and they knew it. We learned a lot from them. Everyone learned a lot from them. Vanadyl became hugely popular, metformin is now FDA approved and given for contest prep, and competitors don’t even think about dieting without clen.

Some of the women were very appreciative. Sex may not have been a motivator in our work with them, but in many cases it was a tantalizing fringe benefit. They weren’t always the hottest things on two feet, but as Dan would always say, “The best looking dog doesn’t always make the best pet.” He had a thing for redheads with very pale, almost transparent skin through which you could see the blue of their veins. I wasn’t as picky and as long as they didn’t talk too much and went home right after I got my nut, I was happy. We both hated annoying things. One of his regulars used to favor this skin-tight tennis-ball-green spandex dress with a huge rose printed on the front. Dan hated that dress and implored her not to wear it. For whatever reason, she would not comply. One afternoon, I was working at my desk when I looked out the window and saw the green dress saunter up Dan’s front steps. She definitely had a way with those hips, but that dress was hideous.

I heard the door open, then immediately slam shut. Then some crashing and banging – something definitely broke – then some yelling; a little screaming; furniture being thrashed about; some cries of pain. Awww! No!, No!, NO!!, NOOOO!!! Some more screaming; then a little moaning. Then, yes!, yes!!, YES!!! YESSSS!!!! followed by the high-pitched squeal of a woman having a big woow-ah. A little while later I saw the girl leave wearing one of Dan’s button-down shirts. I had to hear this one and went next door.

I walked into his living room and found Dan reclined in his Lazy-Boy wearing his famous bathrobe and house slippers, reading a magazine. The floor lamp was across the arm of the couch, the bulb smashed all over the cushions. Some books had been knocked off the shelf and were scattered on the floor; two of the kitchen chairs were knocked over; and there were little strips of tennis ball green material tied at each table leg. “She definitely has a flair for decorating,” I said, surveying the damage. “What happened?”

“You know I hate that fuckin’ dress, John.” He flipped a page and smirked slightly, just like a kid who knew he got away with something like shoplifting.

“But, you’re such a passive guy, Dan.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, closing the magazine and looking up at me smiling like the Cheshire cat. “Usually.”

“So, I imagine you inflicted some sort of punishment on her?” I asked a little sarcastically.

He held his finger up to his chin like he was reliving it just one more time, and then said rather of matter-of-factly, “I ripped that ugly God-damned dress off her, tied her to the table with it and fucked her in the ass.”

“Well done,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “And where is she now, the emergency room? The police station?”

“No, no,” he chuckled. “She went to the mall. I gave her 100 bucks and told her to buy a few more of those dresses.”

The other sexual exploits he told me of were no less distressing, if not completely outlandish. However, the women who didn’t fear him, adored him. You ladies know what I mean. If you all put your heads together you’d have a best seller, even if reality is only half the story.

As much as such antics may piss off the feminists, his other antics really pissed off the cops. Dan’s empirical knowledge of steroids and related chemistry eventually got the attention of the legal community and Dan became an expert witness in many steroid cases. One could speculate that Dan testified at too many steroid trials where his testimony got the guy off. I went to some of these trials as an observer to see the Guru in action. It was obvious the prosecutors hated him. One especially poignant anecdotal incident involved the prosecution’s expert steroid witness. When this expert was cross-examined by the defendant’s attorney as to the source of the steroid information that qualified him as an expert, the witness for the prosecution pointed to Dan in open court and said, “I read his books.” The next sound the court reporter entered into the record was the DA’s head hitting the table.

Not long after that, I was up in San Francisco for the weekend with one of our charges who was competing in the California Championships. I called up Dan to consult with him after the pre-judging and one of the many wayward bodybuilder chicks who was crashing on the Guru’s couch answered the phone. She told me the cops were there yesterday. They kicked in the door, guns drawn, and tackled Dan. They handcuffed him, searched his house and dragged him off. Again. This time for almost 31 months.

Now you have to remember that this was before GHB and Clenbuterol carried the severe sentences they do now. In fact, at the time, GHB was still legal and they didn’t even know what Clenbuterol was. They arrested Dan because he didn’t label the bottles of GHB he sold and someone complained about it to the FDA. His original charge was just a misdemeanor. Then it dawned on the DA that he wasn’t going to do any time, so they charged him with conspiracy to defraud the FDA – a felony. They created a catch-22: Since the FDA wrote the labeling law, it was subject to the FDA’s interpretation. Since there was no possible way to label the GHB he sold, or the Clenbuterol for that matter, he just left the label off – many bottles. His was a dress rehearsal for other GHB cases. Now look at what they do to you. What’s worse is what it did to Dan.

He was never the same after that beef. In fact, the stress leading up to his trial was such that it could have contributed to the mild stroke Dan suffered just before he began to serve his sentence. The stroke impaired his ability to speak and to write. It didn’t stop him, though. While in prison, for the second time, Dan wrote his acclaimed book, Bodyopus.

Under the circumstances, calling Bodyopus just a book is like saying Mount Rushmore is just a stone carving. Dan told me that writing that book was the hardest thing he ever did in his life. The entire first draft was written long hand because they wouldn’t let him use a typewriter. It was made even more difficult because of the stroke. Bodyopus is 500 pages long! It was the same for his columns in Muscle Media 2000 and his fan mail, which continued to come in and which he continued to answer, uninterrupted while he was in prison. I remembered the letters he wrote me at the beginning of his incarceration; scrawl, barely legible, incomplete sentences. His phone calls were tough to understand, too. Even after he got out, he still had trouble speaking for quite awhile.

The doctors never figured out what caused his stroke. His blood pressure was high – 160/120, probably a contributing factor. The stress of knowing he was going to prison could have contributed. It may have been the Clenbuterol – who knows? It definitely wasn’t steroids, although most people love to think it was. Steroids were also not what killed him. Steroids were what made Dan notorious. Not because they’re evil, but because whatever Dan told you to do, to some degree, worked, and there was never a shortage of competitors willing to be the test subject upon which he’d hone his craft. It was amazing to what extent that was so.

I was summoned to some bodybuilder chick’s hotel room late one night before a show in LA at Dan’s behest. I knew this girl was having problems dialing in earlier in the week and she had compounded matters by falling asleep in the tanning bed and scorching both sides of her body so badly that leprosy would have been a convincing diagnosis. There were about 100 used insulin syringes lying in a pile on the bed along with several empty vials of Esiclene. The girl was hitting poses in the mirror wearing just a thong, and the only thing that looked more revolting than the shriveled remains of her breasts were the huge patches of skin she was missing. In their place were gobs of some kind of cortical ointment that smelled like something you’d be sure to throw away rather than slather all over you body, much less rub over an open wound. But, for all the pain that must have been circulating in her little body, this chick was wearing a mask of hubris. She might as well have been Ms. Olympia.

We stood behind her looking at her reflection in the mirror. Dan crossed his arms in front of him and asked, “So, what do you think?”

“What do I think?” I repeated back. I turned and sat in the chair over by the window trying to figure out what he meant by that question and if he really expected me to answer it in front of her. He narrowed his eyes at her reflection while she hit another pose, waiting for me to answer. I knew he was looking at something and it intrigued him, but I couldn’t figure out what; she looked like she had been bobbing for French fries. “I don’t know, Dan. I guess if you told me she just crawled across the Mojave Desert wearing that same get up, I’d have to say she looks pretty good.”

“Don’t you think her legs have come in since Tuesday?” he asked with all the alacrity of a mortician.

Was I the only one who could see this chick looked hideous? “It’s hard to tell looking between the patches of missing skin. Dan, you’re not seriously going to encourage her to go out on stage, are you?”

Ever the low-comic Tennyson, Dan looked at her and, in a tone so blasé it is etched in my mind forever, he said, “There are only two ways we learn new things in this biz, John. One is through serendipity, the other is failure.” As far as Dan was concerned, there was no failure in trying. In bodybuilding, where the winners are so few and the also-rans so many, trying carries a lot of weight. Dan had obviously tried something on this chick and whatever it was, he saw through the detritus and was pleased with the result. He never told me what it was he did to her, but you can be sure many of you benefited from it.

Dan was an enigma wrapped in an anachronism, and admired in so many contradictory ways. He is cherished among a certain part of bodybuilding’s core as the 20th century pioneer who popularized the do-it-yourself steroid user. The guy who took steroids out of the hospital and put them in your goddamn bathroom. No pantheon of modern bodybuilding is complete without him.

At the same time, while those in power decried his influence over such a deep underground, others were signing his charges to endorsement contracts. Still, he was reviled by those who thought his magic was black, especially when applied to women. But, for the men and women who understood, magic is magic – they didn’t care what color it was, just as long as it worked.

Dan definitely had a tremendous influence on bodybuilding. The sad thing is that if you scraped that dirty outer ring of “steroid guru” off his persona, you were left with a pretty fine human being – a guy who would give you the shirt off his back; a guy who was as multi-faceted and complex as he was warm and caring.

Those of us who knew that were an odd lot to be sure. Along with the assortment of bodybuilding’s more colorful constituents, there were various steroid dealers, assorted schmoes and big beefy women. There was also an AIDS researcher, a dude who harvested organs from cadavers, a really weird radio announcer, a drummer waiting for new kidney, various scientists, entrepreneurs, writers, theater people, a college professor and Dan’s only family member, Aunt Loraine.

We were the ones who knew Dan wanted to be a daddy; that he collected baby dinosaur dolls; that his love was the theater; that his speakers sounded incredible; that his recumbent bike looked really cool; and so did he in the Lotus 7 replica he kept in Maine at his aunt’s house. He only drove it wearing his “motoring shoes” that he bought from a catalog, along with the bathrobe and slippers he had Aunt Loraine send him in prison.

“Eccentric” best described Dan. Curiously eccentric and loved by as many who misunderstood him. Just like most geniuses. What I would give for just one more conversation with Dan Duchaine could only be eclipsed by what I would give to have been able to fly up to New York in December of ‘99.

I really miss him.

HM: IFG-1 … Dan you seem to be standing back on this one. Colgan thinks it will bring on the age of the superfreak, while you have only spoken of its use in fat reduction. We know GH never panned out as incredible as everyone wanted it to. Do you want to make sure it is the real deal before you give it your stamp of approval? We keep hearing every imaginable scenario ranging from “the stuff is fantastic” to “didn’t do anything for me.” Do you have any opinions on how it is best used? It was reported to work a lot better with GH in a study. Do you have any theories on how or what compounds (steroids, anticatabolics, insulin mimickers) could be used in a synergistic protocol for best results with IGF?

Dan:Well Colgan really calls it all the time, doesn’t he? (laughs) Because he’s always wrong – when Twinlabs changes their mind. Vanadyl sulfate is toxic but now that Twin is selling it, it’s not toxic any more! But anyway, enough about Colgan. You know the thing is … I’ve never seen any real IGF-1. All the stuff I’ve seen pictures of and read about is the lab cell culture which is doctored not to bind on the carrier proteins. So it would probably be wonderful. You sent me a couple of reports and I read some others and if you look at the amounts they were using, it was quite high actually. Because of a four hour half-life they were using it twice a day, at a calculated dosage of 18mg a day. That’s a very high amount. And these bodybuilders are taking 50micrograms. And I find it hard to believe that 50 micrograms might do anything considering … God knows what they might have stacked on top of that. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think IGF will be terrific once it gets cheap enough to use. And you really want it to bind on the carrier proteins. You want it to last for the 4 hours. The cell culture stuff has a half life of 20 minutes, you don’t want that. It’s as short as growth hormone … you have to use the high amounts. Eventually someone will offer it either out of Russia or Australia. Of course you know, there were some side effects such as jaw pain and weird funky stuff. And it does work well with GH synergistically. They’re just the opposite of each other. IGF-1 would lower your blood sugar and GH does the opposite. Together it stabilizes it. So the worst thing you could do is to use IGF-1 and insulin at the same time, you would conk out. I think it has a lot of potential. The only problem with all that stuff … if you remember back to the geriatrics using GH, when they stopped using GH, within a few weeks all the benefits ceased. At least when you stop steroids, it takes a year or more for all those gains to completely disappear. And I’m afraid for the high expense of IGF-1, that when you go off it, I wonder how long it will last.

HM: Yeah, a couple people told us they used it, and they said how awesome it worked and they weren’t using anything else.

Dan:Over the phone…?

HM: Yeah.

Dan: Oh, yeah you know how that goes – “I’m 190 and ripped” and you see them in real life and it’s a fat piece of shit. (We are all laughing hard.) It’s like on the Internet, everybody is big and strong and ripped – on the computer and you meet them in real life and they are little dorks!

HM: (Laughing) Hypothetically, if you were going to use IGF-1, would you use it with…?

Dan: Oh yeah, steroids, GH, you would want to use it all for a synergistic effect. But definitely with growth hormone, all the studies say it’s not only additive … put it this way … if you could get a ½ pound gain from IGF-1, and a ½ pound gain from growth hormone – if you put them together you wouldn’t get just one pound, you would get much more, they are synergistic with the two added together … so yeah, go for it.

HM: Anything on the amounts of growth hormone?

Dan: Frankly, I think, nobody has used enough growth hormone because of the cost. The only guy I know of, the rumors were that (top WBF guy) was using like 12 IU’s of GH a day. Every day. I don’t know if that’s true but that is pretty close to what someone should be using, for best results I would think. In the PDR, it’s pretty cut and dry in what you should be using. The Genetech is not as efficient as the Lilly. It’s microgram per kilogram – you can figure it out. It seems that a lot of bodybuilders are going low in dosage. In the early 80′s it was worse, the recommended dosage was 2 IU’s a week at $90 bucks a pop – like 2 IU’s would even do anything. And people were wondering why it didn’t work…

HM: Yeah, you might as well pound down some arginine. (joke)

Dan: I know the stunted growth children were taking it 3 times a week, but I don’t know why only 3 times a week. Why not every day? It seems logical to me that it should be everyday. It’s just like IGF-1 is supposed to be twice a day. And GH is even shorter acting so who knows.

HM: Maybe 4 times a day might do some good??!!

Dan: Yeah.

HM: Do you still feel Nolvadex can be put to good use – even though studies show it to decrease serum blood IGF levels in the body by 25%? Many have theorized that it lessens the muscle gains on a steroid cycle – do you agree?

Dan: Everyone said that even though they liked to use Nolvadex during dieting, they always found that during the off-season … they grew better without it. That was interesting. It might be the IGF-1. We somehow thought it was tied to estrogen but I don’t know why. It depends. Past a certain age … like I’m 43 … if you measured my growth hormone and IGF-1 at middle age it is not very large. Would reducing it 25% make a major difference when it is so low to begin with? Probably not. It depends. As you get older, estrogen is more important to avoid for a lot of reasons, you know … prostate cancer, this and that. But when you’re young, you could probably avoid Nolvadex. You know so many people have spent so much money on Nolvadex to combat gyno that they could have easily gotten the surgery for the same amount of money and cured the problem. Half of the people who go through puberty usually get some kind of gyno. They don’t necessarily remember it, but it happens. And if you had gyno as an adolescent, you are going to get it if you use steroids – unless you totally avoid all the things that would cause it. And I don’t know if Nolvadex will help those kind of people. I don’t know if it is a real preventative. Close to two bucks a tab – get the surgery.

HM: How do you feel about Clomid’s use as a prevention of gyno – overrated? Could a 2 on / 2 off program of Clomid be something in which gyno could be prevented in your opinion?

Dan: You know Teslac is an ideal antiestrogen but we could never find it out of the country, and we looked too. Clomid … inexpensive in Mexico but very expensive here. Everyone has done quite well with it for raising testosterone if you are young enough with 2 tabs a day. As far as an … they never approved it as an antiestrogen because it was more toxic than Nolvadex. Most people who use Clomid, they are not using it all year long. The problem is everyone’s using so much testosterone – not a little but a lot! Back in the 80′s we thought there was some kind of precision to anabolic use but now it is not quality but quantity…

HM: Have you had a chance to look at the other growth factors (EGF, fibroblast growth factor, nerve growth factor, TGF, etc.)… If so, do you feel any or all of these are interesting on a muscle-building standpoint?

Dan: Oh sure! There has been some research that the epidermal growth factor has been effective … but all the G.F.’s have been marketed at such a high price that people are unable to use high dosages. But who knows what’s going to happen when prices come down and people are on some higher dosages. At the higher dosages, who knows what will be the outcome.

HM: Have you heard or have any insight on the new fat hormone drug in development?

Dan: Leptin … a few years ago we were talking about brown fat and having the beta 3 receptors and I believe they figured out that leptin is one of the naturally occurring beta 3 agonists in the body. The interesting thing about beta 3 receptors is that there’s not many in the body, you got many more beta 2 receptors in the muscle. The beta 3′s are only in small areas. However the nice thing about leptin is you don’t need a lot and unlike clenbuterol, you don’t down regulate the receptors. So for bodybuilding, it might be pretty good. However, for most of the obese people who think they are going to need it, some research has shown that they (obese) have genetically damaged beta 3 receptors that don’t accept it. And many obese people have very high leptin levels already. The body is trying to compensate so it’s not going to help them much. But it will be good for athletes because – clenbuterol is good but it only lasts 2-3 weeks at a time unless you jack up the dosage sky-high. As I mentioned on an audiotape a while ago, there is another thermogenic compound that I’ll probably introduce at the end of the year. Even though I promised January 1. It is much more thermogenic than clenbuterol and doesn’t even involve those receptors at all. It is much better and cheaper. More dangerous though because if you take too much you don’t get sick … you die! Because you raise your body temp over 105 degrees and your cooked brain turns into poached eggs. So I have been hesitant introducing it or writing about it without some safeguards.

HM: To be blatantly honest with you, Dan, we have seen you come full circle on your diet theories. In your first book you recommended eating a lot and often. Now it seems you are approaching a nutrient density theory on diet. Low calories – high nutrients. Correct us if we are wrong. Even though nutrient density looks good on paper and looks like it will build the muscle desired, how come the guys (natural and unnatural) who really push the calories, really seem to be the ones putting on the greatest amount of muscle (and of course, extra bodyfat too)? i.e. … Yates, Sombaty versus Ray, Wheeler, etc. … Do you feel there is any possibility that the body can speed up with a more efficient anabolic effect with abundant calories – just as the metabolism slows down somewhat at deprivation of food? Couldn’t the body adapt somewhat to a tremendous muscle building overload effect with food if a huge amount of demand (brutal workouts) is there?

Dan: Well … I don’t think Yates and Sombaty get that fat actually. I must admit when I started out I wasn’t the smartest guy in the world back then. I just had a knack with the words back in the early 80′s. And I’m sure we were wrong on a lot of things. The thing is … there are a few individuals that can get up to 15-20% bodyfat, put on a lot of muscle and then be able to take it off. I have no problem getting that fat in off-season if they can prove to me they can get in shape. Obviously, like Rory Leidermeyer, he never got it right – he always fucked up. And most people who get that fat (15-20%) have trouble getting back down and even if they do, their vascularity and skin taughtness suffers.

HM: Do you feel it is a compromise though, not taking in enough food, with trying to maximize muscle mass?

Dan: You should always eat as much food as you can, but I think some people should spend the thirty bucks on calipers and keep the threshold of bodyfat at 12% or lower. Fifteen percent of bodyfat with a guy with a lot of muscle … he looks pretty fat. That’s a bodybuilder who really is a powerlifter with a gut. Twelve percent isn’t too sloppy and you can come down and up in bodyweight with some ease. But there are some people that can pull it off, but rarely have seen anyone going into a contest not fuck up on the way down.

HM: If you could pull it off, and eat a lot more food in the off-season, do you feel that you could gain more mass like that?

Dan: Sure, sure, but the secret is to keep it when you diet it off. First of let me say this. People lie. Vic Richards does not eat 15,000 calories. The guy pretty much can’t count, he’s so stupid. The guy wouldn’t be able to count up the boxes with a calculator if the boxes were in front of him so I doubt 15,000. Very few people can hit 7,000. Strydom hit 7,000 but he had a lot of support to do that. People think if you eat so many calories you must be hotter. That’s not true. An inch of fat all around the body will keep the heat in. If you have thin skin you are radiating heat out into the room so you can get away with taking in more calories.

HM: But let’s say you have two twins. One of the twins says I’m going to get as big as I can while the other twin wants to build muscle but keep lean. Do you think that the guy who is taking in the gross amount of calories to build big time muscle (when they measure him in a water tank) will have a lot more muscle than the twin who tried to keep his bodyfat to a minimum?

Dan: Yes. Yes, but when they both come down to 6% bodyfat it will be very close because of the dieting. I think the high calorie guy will have a slight advantage in muscle mass but what is his skin and vascularity going to be like? But I must tell you, most bodybuilders I know eat more than 3,000 unless they lie around all day. Even I eat close to 3,000 but I … well I ride my bike quite a bit now. Most of those pros, of course, hold water but a lot of that fat is held under their abdominal wall in their viscera. That’s not increase size of the gut from GH but a combination of high carbs, high insulin and high testosterone. All that fat in there is very sensitive to androgens especially DHT.

HM: Do you think they can ever get rid of that? The visceral fat?

Dan: They would lose a lot of muscle. Visceral fat is like the last fat to come off the body. Back in the old days when they weren’t using a lot of androgens, you didn’t have that. But now with everyone using so much testosterone, that gut is all over the place now. Pros, amateurs … you know.

HM: Wouldn’t clenbuterol be at its most useful in these high density / calorie diets? Have you ever experimented with a clen / volume food intake protocol?

Dan: That’s kind of like pointless, because many of these top pros use clen all year round unless they run out of it. And they are using 10-15 tablets a day. The problem is that it works 2 weeks and that’s it. If you cycle it 2 weeks on and then three weeks off then … yeah it could work well. You could be precise about it but you’ll never do it. (Dan was speaking of the thermometer method each morning as he has described in past articles.) It’s so nice to eat so much shit on clen that people just don’t get off it.

***

HM: You have spoken of a high fat diet. Is this different somewhat than DiPasquales’? If so, what are your basic recommendations?

Dan: First off, high fat diets have been around for quite awhile. I mean before Zumpano, there was the Atkins diet which was mostly low carbs all the time, which is not the healthiest thing in the world. Especially for athletes because it is too catabolic, over time. Both DiPasquales’ and mine are based on the 7 day (5 on, 2 off) plan. I’m a little more precise. He doesn’t care to get into ketosis, blood sugar, ketones in the urine and I do. Ketones are fractured fats and they are not as efficient as regular fats so you need more grams for the energy. Of course, it is a nice diet that he has done because it is just a rip-off of our stuff from the early 80′s.

HM: He seems really vague about it.

Dan: The problem is I used that diet for a long time in the early 80′s and most of the guys in prison were on it. You have to really do it yourself. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of people on a one-to-one basis to really get the feedback. I doubt he has done it himself for a prolonged amount of time. He’s armchair about it. People rebel against it and don’t want to follow it. But you have to expect that.

HM: On your 33/33/33 diet are there any important do’s and don’ts? Do you feel that the above diet is more beneficial dieting or can it be used ideally for muscle building too?

Dan: About 25% of the people in the U.S. wouldn’t need that diet. They have really great insulin sensitivity. These people process carbs well and don’t give a shit about aerobics and that would be fine. There are another 25% that are quite lousy at processing carbs like myself. And then there are about 50% that are somewhere in the middle. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There are essential amino acids, essential minerals / vitamins. There are essential fatty acids. There is no such thing as essential carbs. Protein can be turned into fat. Protein can turn into glucose. Past a certain point on many people, much of the protein and carbs that you eat are turned into fat right in the body – right in the liver and you have no control over it – and it is only one kind of fat. Saturated fat. Saturated fat really lowers insulin sensitivity. So if you just accept that your body is going to have some kind of fat in there, it is better to control it yourself than let the body do it.

***

HM: I have heard of some people still trying to crush up those Anadrol tablets and inject them.

Dan: Yeah, I remember one 50 mg shot injected seemed to feel like 3 orals. Hey, have you guys seen some of these guys with the instant calves? I talked to Nadler about that because some of these guys are way too poor for implants. I asked, could you do collagen there and he said, “Yeah, but it’s 250 dollars a cc.” But you can easily inject saline water in the muscle and it will swell up for a few days. You could do that for calves for a contest and it’s a lot cheaper than Esiclene. It would swell up much better.

HM: Some people get nerve damage from …

Dan: Well, Nadler showed me step-by-step instructions on how to put silicone in your calves. Just long small amounts in your calves, not large amounts, and your muscle will encapsulate it. And you can keep building it up and building it up. You could do biceps too.

HM: How do you put the silicone in though?

Dan: A needle, but of course it is not legal to do it in this country. But you could easily do it in Tijuana.

HM: Could be dangerous with the silicone though – like it is with breast implants.

Dan: That’s a little different; you’re only using small amounts. When they originally did silicone in the 70′s before they put it in the sac, they put a massive amount in the gland. But if you used a small amount and let the body encapsulate it, you could do it. I would do it.

HM: Will it move with the muscle though?

Dan: Yes it will. That’s the nice thing about it. Nadler can’t do it in this country but I could ask him – if he went to Tijuana, would he do it there? You would have to go back and forth because you couldn’t do it all at once.

HM: Could someone do it themselves?

Dan: (Dan got a good chuckle out of that one.) I could probably do it. I have no fear of needles. I’ll ask him.

MESO-Rx: What is your current “receptor theory”? And what implications does this have for cycling and tapering?

Dan:As much as I find Bill Roberts entertaining and, in my newsletter, I talk about how much research – mostly in vitro studies – shows an up-regulation of steroid receptors when there are high dosages of steroids around, I don’t think it captures the whole picture because you can put a whole lot of steroids in a person and without training they can have very little muscle growth. You’ll see a lot of muscle growth when there is training involved. As much as Bill is talking about up-regulation of steroid receptors, he has really neglected the whole up-regulation with training. So, I really don’t have an answer for that. Also, we really never answered the question as to why the first time steroid user does so spectacularly well on very low dosages and that’s never to be repeated. I don’t know, but it will be interesting to see… I’ve been pretty much off steroids for many, many years because of my testing arrangements with the government. And in a few more months I will have the opportunity to use steroids again. It will be interesting if I get the kind of growth I got from the first time I usedDianabolin my twenties. Of course, I’m an older guy, so probably not.

MESO-Rx: What is the “Deca dilemma”?

Dan:If Bill Roberts and others are to be believed,Deca Durabolinactually has a higher attraction to steroid receptors. I mean if you have equal amount ofDeca Durabolinand testosterone, it would be easier forDeca Durabolinto latch onto the receptor. Now what actually happens we found from anecdotal and rat studies that even though there is more available to the receptors it is half as anabolic. So, that is the dilemma: Why is it only half as anabolic when there is probably more of it at the receptors? It must be that it is doing something to the receptors that testosterone is but Deca isn’t or testosterone might be doing something outside the receptor. I don’t know. I think there is some kind of anabolic reaction outside the receptor. What it is we don’t know. I mean there is a whole bunch of new things. It might be that it influences the myostatin protein that was recently introduced, or maybe testosterone does a better job of up-regulating the receptor or something like that; it might be something completely inside where you might have more of a response of fibroblast growth factor in response to muscle cell membrane-wounding from training. It could be any of those. But because steroid subjects are not really marketable as of late, in my magazine writing I have not really pursued that avenue too much but I will get around to reading the research if there is an answer to be found. The odd thing is that as much as we look to the research, a scientist has never really made one big bodybuilder; I mean there is no doctor or scientist that has said this is how to grow a human being big, bigger than all these bodybuilders who don’t know what they’re doing. They’ve never done that, so I’m not sure we can look to answer this?

MESO-Rx: What advice would you give to people looking to take advantage of the greater anabolic activity of testosterone while avoiding side effects? Would you recommend the use of any accessory drugs?

Dan: What happens is people read all these things about steroids and they are usually written by people who have never used steroids before, and they’re usually anti-steroid, and they just assume… I always say never assume you have the problem until you have the problem. As much as I’ve encountered high amounts of testosterone causing hair loss, and acne, and mood changes… However, the average, pedestrian steroid user, who is not going to be using it months and months at a time and they are only thinking about a cycle of steroids perhaps 6-8 weeks 1 or 2 times a year and not necessarily year after year after year, maybe none of these side effects will ever happen. Obviously, if for some reason, parents – the father and grandfather – show marked hair loss at a very young age or if the individual really had some kind of gyno problem or acne in high school, that might be an indicator of potential problems. Then again, it could be that a cycle of 500-600mg of testosterone for 6-8 weeks would hardly do anything bad.

The thing is you see a lot of pro bodybuilders use a lot of testosterone and it is rare that you see them losing their hair. I mean some do but just as many don’t as do. Many of the top bodybuilders rarely show any acne. So go figure.

Some people never lose their hair, but if you are concerned about it , for example, at my age, with my tenuous hair state, I really wouldn’t use a lot of testosterone, I would rather useDeca Durabolin. The problem is that the accessory drugs, whether it beCytadrenorArimidexfor the estrogen orProscar, well, I could probably find them but not everyone in the country could find these accessory drugs and it’s just an added expense. Currently, on the black market,Deca Durabolinis fairly well priced. However, it’s not like Deca is so expensive, you could use testosterone and the accessory drugs and come out ahead. No.

MESO-Rx: Is progesterone used in the competitive bodybuilders’ drug arsenal? If so, under what conditions would it be beneficial?

Dan: Years ago when they hadTrophobolene, that was testosterone with progesterone… I’m not quite sure that they used it to make the testosterone more anabolic. Progesterone does have the ability to stimulate your appetite and can deposit triglycerides in the muscle and increase the amount of intramuscular fat. Both of which, I think, would be beneficial for bodybuilders provided you are not getting that pot belly look. I’ve known a few people using that combination and they’ve never had a potbelly, so I don’t know.

As to whether it would be beneficial for these testosterone precursors…I mean it is true that women do a better job of converting androstenedione into testosterone because they have more of that converting enzyme. And the reason is progesterone – because it down-regulates estrogen by up-regulating that enzyme. Yes, probably if you could find a very short acting oral progesterone that would affect these liver enzymes and rapidly dissipate. But it is by its nature, through a variety of mechanisms, catabolic long term in the human body. So you would want to find… you wouldn’t want to use an injectable form of progesterone, but perhaps the creams might be worthwhile.

MESO-Rx: You have done a lot of work with DNP. What is DNP? How does it work?

Dan: Forty percent of your energy expenditure in your body…40% of the calories that you consume everyday is burned up as non-essential heat. Sixty percent of the energy is needed for metabolic processes, and to keep the cells alive and the processes involved. Forty percent is futile heat energy: there is no work being done, there is no ATP being used or produced for work. In humans, that is controlled by uncoupling proteins in light fat and skeletal muscle. UCPs, 2′s and 3′s, mediated by mostly beta-4 receptors in skeletal muscles and light fat. Dinitrophenol is an industrial chemical that has direct action on the heat production action in the mitochondria without any kind of receptor… it bypasses any kind of receptor or uncoupling protein. It pretty much throws protons off fatty acids and it turns into heat rather than ATP. It was a very popular weight loss drug in the 40s in this country but in that very unregulated time there were a lot of mis-prescribing and misuse of it and a high incidence of cataracts in women. And so it was banned from interstate transport although a doctor in almost every state could still prescribe it as long as they made the DNP within the state.

MESO-Rx: What causes the cataracts? What other problems occur?

Dan: Depletion of antioxidants in the eyeball specifically glutathione and Vitamin C. I always suspected it was the Vitamin C because the early research pointed out there was a depletion of Vitamin C in the cells, especially in the eyeball. Just recently, a couple of weeks ago, most newspapers reported a study that suggested supplemental Vitamin C could help avoid most cataracts.

Not everybody stays on it forever because you feel so miserable on it. I think most of the people having trouble with DNP don’t understand it. There was a misunderstanding of how DNP worked as opposed to other thermogenic agents in that we couldn’t really rely on measured body temperature to adjust the dosage. The human body can withstand a moderate fever, the body temperature can go well over a hundred degrees and you are kind of uncomfortable but you live, but it is not insufferable high. Because DNP allows the dilation of skin cells so that a lot of the heat is being radiated off, your body temperature is very, very high even though the mouth thermometer is really not showing a tremendous rise in body temperature. A 30 percent rise above normal, and your body temperature is only about 99.2 degrees. The hazard is that just because you have been able to tolerate ephedrine or yohimbe or clenbuterol in the past, temperatures of like a hundred or so, you should not try to get you body temperature that high on DNP because once it is that high you are well over double the metabolic rate and many of your cells are depleted of the energy source and things can get dangerous at that point.

MESO-Rx: You have recommended the use of insulin to enhance the efficacy of DNP use in bodybuilders…

Dan: It is not so much my idea but a research scientist out of the 30s that recommended it. Protein synthesis stops on DNP. Luckily for most sedentary people the research has not really shown a loss of muscle mass although it would stop testosterone production out of the gonads and might interfere with the transference of testosterone in the cells. However, they did show a study where by supplementing the DNP with growth hormone and insulin, they re-established protein synthesis. However, I must tell you about half of the heat producing ability of DNP comes from glucose being burned as heat and the other is fatty acids; so, if you put more glucose in your cells with insulin, you will become more uncomfortable because there will be more heat put off. We’ve done it both ways… we’ve done DNP with no insulin and those with it, and they were better off with it. We didn’t need much, maybe once a day with short-acting stuff.

MESO-Rx: Any other compounds that work through a protein uncoupling mechanism?

Dan: Some fatty acids, some of the polyunsaturated fatty acids would do it. Flax oil would do it, to a point, that’s why you don’t really get too fat with flax oil. Progesterone has an uncoupling effect but you have to be careful because at the same time it makes you fat. It kind of balances things out. Although your body temperature goes up, there is more fatty acids being placed in the fat cells and the muscle cells. There were a few studies where they purified some specific insect thoraxes, and they found an uncoupling effect there, although I don’t think you’ll see that come to the market soon. Although it would probably be legal to do that. Thermogenic bug guts!

MESO-Rx: What about any naturally occurring herbal compounds? I seem to recall you mentioning one in your ‘Ask the Guru’ column.

Dan: I don’t know what it is yet. It’s a Latin herbal compound. I pursued it for a few days and couldn’t get an answer so I moved on to something else. I don’t know what it is yet but I imagine there is something there. Some kind of defense mechanism to keep animals away from it. One of those things in nature…some plants are attractive to be eaten to spread the seeds through transport with animals, and other things are just the opposite – to keep them away from plants. I’ll keep it in mind and try to find an answer.

MESO-Rx: You have a lot of experience working with female bodybuilders. Do you feel anabolic steroids are necessary to develop a championship physique today in female bodybuilding and fitness competition?

Dan: Once they have their foundation… Well, it depends, most of the female bodybuilders that win are 150lbs and under so they’re not terribly big. And quite frankly, people will tell you once you have a foundation, and that’s not a lot of muscle, you shouldn’t need a whole bunch of muscle to keep it up, you don’t even have to train that hard to keep it up. I mean muscle mass does go away with dieting, so if these females tend to get very heavy in the off season and diet for long spans of time to get in shape, yeah, they’re going to sacrifice muscle to lose all that fat. Unless they get so damn fat in the off season, they shouldn’t have to use much of anything to maintain muscle mass. Some female bodybuilders objectively should be female bodybuilders because they pretty much look that way before they train. I remember the first few contests, even national ones, that Carla Dunlap entered and won, all she did was swim; she rarely worked out in the gym. She had the basic muscle structure and muscle bellies and all she had to do was add some muscularity to it. Then there are other women who shouldn’t be female bodybuilders because they have to try so hard at everything just to get the muscle on. Those kind of people need the drugs and more than probably should be used in female bodybuilders and they probably shouldn’t be in the sport. But whom am I to say that? They need to get out of it. From a business standpoint there’s not much money in the sport. I guess you have to be mentally maladjusted to pursue it. It becomes too hard after being stubborn about.

MESO-Rx: Do you think DNP, ipriflavone, and insulin are possible alternatives to steroids?

Dan: A few women have used DNP. I’m afraid to say that a lot of women did suffer on DNP because they were using too much more than necessary. I say that because they get in shape in such a fast time, they’re ready 3 or 4 weeks before the contest and they really suffer to get there because their body temperature is so elevated. Now looking back, we could have used ½ maybe 1/3 the dosage and took our time so that we peaked right on time rather than way ahead of time.

Ipriflavone from Italy, the other from Hungary…As much as I begged people to get it in the country, it has never shown up. I’ve never seen one box of that stuff being used. I don’t know why. Usually, I have a pretty good track record of recommending something and suddenly it shows up here, but that never made it over here.

MESO-Rx: What are your recommendations for reducing lower body fat distribution?

Dan: You can use a number of things. Yeah, there is definitely a yohimbe injection they use as some kind of attempt to lose fat in the thighs ….of course, it is water-based so it will probably dissipate out of fat but it is probably more potent than a topical cream, but that will work too. ACE inhibitors along with the yohimbe…the thing is that whenever you have a foreign product in your body, an antagonist, whether it be an estrogen antagonist or an alpha-2 antagonist, the body likes to not accept that, and the body usually tries to up-regulate those receptors in response. So you have to fight that up-regulation; the only two ways I know of down-regulating alpha-2 receptors are to use an ACE inhibitor or you can also use a whole bunch of clenbuterol because when you down-regulate a beta-2 receptor, the alpha receptors down-regulate also.

MESO-Rx: What is the future of natural testosterone boosters, such as androstenedione and androstenediol?

Dan: I’m sure that after a while the FDA will try to find a way to get it off the market. Just last week the IOC placed androstenedione on the banned list. I think it is really the future. I think it is the only thing the will really advance natural bodybuilding because otherwise the only people who will do well in natural bodybuilding are black guys who have naturally great genetics. The thing is that steroids, all things being equal, if you have the same amount of money, gives you a pretty much level playing field, because anyone can get the steroid and work on it. When you get to natural bodybuilding, your advantage is kind of set with your parents. Granted, there are a whole lot of tricks to get your testosterone elevated but even so you’ll have to use every one of them.

MESO-Rx: How can these be utilized to their fullest potential? Can these supplements be improved on?

Dan: Intensify the enzyme, somehow, that would be one thing. Bypass the oral route, make an injection of it or a nasal spray of it.

MESO-Rx: Is there a way to increase the enzymes involved in their conversion to testosterone?

Dan: I’m looking into that right now. There are herbal compounds that increase the conversion. But the tricky thing is if you use too much ofForskolin, the herbal compound, you will actually have the opposite effect becauseForskolinalthough it increases cyclic AMP, too much will inhibit the glucose transport system necessary to get androstenedione into testosterone and then you’ll have less than before. Progesterone, short term and maybe a couple of other things. We don’t really know them yet but we will.

MESO-Rx: Do you think the FDA is going to regulate any of these testosterone precursors any time soon?

Dan: Well somebody has already. Schwartz Labs mentioned that their norandrostenedione is being held in customs. The thing is the nor- version is probably grandfathered in because all you have to do is pull some of these orchic extracts, you know like bull and horse testicles, off the shelves, which have been around for decades, and you would have an analysis of the androgens and you would find norandrostenedione in there, which there are actually. And they would be allowed from the grandfather clause. For example, melatonin, which is a hormone and technically shouldn’t be on the market, was grandfathered in because it was a powerful hormone, a drug, that was on the shelves before the dietary supplement act but they are not going to pull it now. And we could use that same argument…it’s just a matter of using a FDA private attorney but none of the big companies are really selling that product so no one is going to do it.

MESO-Rx: There is considerable debate as to whether androstenedione and related compounds are really ‘natural’. What is your feeling on this issue?

Dan: Yes, but the thing is that’s a moral judgment. You have to decide what is going to be allowed as natural because many natural supplements right now are drugs. Yohimbe, ephedrine are not necessary for life. They’re not nutrients. They’re not even micronutrients. They’re drugs! Let’s say for example, yohimbe under 5mg is legal over 5mg it’s prescription. So is it allowed or not? Let’s say for example, the FDA somehow got their way and made ephedrine a controlled substance, a prescription drug. Suddenly that would be on the banned list. For example, ephedrine is on the [IOC] banned list, yohimbe is on the banned list. Why would they allow it in natural bodybuilding contests? I mean if you really want to go after everything, use the whole banned list. But if that happens, you’ll have some piss poor looking bodybuilders, fat and small, unless you have a few, 2 or 3 guys in the country that look good without anything. So, my feeling is… plus the fact that many things that are allowed in this country, for example, creatine is allowed in this country and it’s not on the banned list and it’s considered part of the natural bodybuilder’s armada, but that’s an unfair advantage because in Canada, creatine is a prescription drug and they don’t allow it in the country. That’s not really fair. So, actually if you have a Canadian natural bodybuilder using creatine, he would be breaking federal laws in Canada using creatine. You just have to figure out what’s legal. I think you should do the broadest possible interpreting and that would be what’s legal in America because if we just allowed what’s legal in Germany, there would be hardly anything we could use.

MESO-Rx: Synthol. Bodybuilders have been injecting oil-based steroids into their bodies for years. Why are the fatty acids in Synthol encapsulated but not other types of fatty acids? What makes Synthol special?

Dan: The interesting thing is that MCTs have been around a long time. Why is it nobody figured out how to do that years ago? It’s so simple inject Parillo’s CapTri, stick it in your arm, and your arm is bigger. Who would have thought? It’s so bizarre, you know, plenty of us inject oily steroids into muscles and they don’t swell up forever. I don’t know what it is – I guess I haven’t asked the right person as to why it is staying around. It’s kind of interesting – most of the Synthol being sold in this country are counterfeits made in this country. And even the counterfeits work exactly the same.

MESO-Rx: Any negative long-term consequences?

Dan: We’ll find out – who knows? Luckily it only seems to last about 6 months. I guess there’s enough people out there that have been using it because it’s been around on the continent for a long time now. No one’s complained about it or had problems. So far, so good.

MESO-Rx: A lot of bodybuilders have been usingReforvitbut many are still dubious of the claim that it is more effective orally than intramuscularly. How can a different route of administration make such a difference in its efficacy?

Dan: It was pretty much anecdotal at first. Back in the early 80s, we had the first versions of injectableDianabol. In the veterinarian market of Mexico, we found these little yellow boxes of injectableDianabol. We went to the market with International Pharmaceuticals; it was the first big product for that company to make it in America. We just assumed since it was injected it would bypass the liver and be much more potent but people were disappointed that a cc a day wasn’t any better and perhaps worse than 5 tablets a day. Anecdotally, everyone has always wanted to stack an oral with an injectable. We always knew they had more growth on it. So, if you want to accept that anecdotal story as true, now you have to figure out why that might be. The only thing we can think of is that a lot of oral steroids passing through the liver the first time through might be causing some kind of IGF-1 or growth hormone or fibroblast growth factor being released out of the liver into the blood stream. That’s the only the thing I can think of.

MESO-Rx: Are any medical researchers (or renegade researchers) working on administering testosterone via a cyclodextrin-based nasal spray?

Dan: We know how to do it. Researchers have done it already. I read that in some research that Michael Dulnig, that AIDS activist that died a few years ago, showed me. Cyclodextrin, the one that we need for steroid use, costs about $400 per kilo, and you need about 10x the amount of cyclodextrin as the steroid. So, if you want to do a kilo of androstenedione or androstenediol you need 10 kilos of cyclodextrin. That’s an expense, so you’re talking about $4500. I had to do a couple of other supplement projects suddenly so my money went there. Otherwise I probably would have had it done by now.

MESO-Rx: What advantages would this have over weekly injections of a testosterone ester?

Dan:A lot of the strength gains from androstene is from the receptors in the nervous system and the nasal spray will really hit those nerves in the whole brain area pronto! The other thing is most receptors in the body under the influence of steady state amounts of hormones usually down-regulate at some point. The beta-3 and beta-4 receptors probably up-regulate under additional steady state of hormones. But many others, like insulin receptors, and perhaps at some point, steroid receptors down-regulate. Testosterone in the body and growth hormone… all the endocrine hormones, are pulsed into the bloodstream. In studies of growth hormone, they have shown that with 6-8 pulses IV a day, so that you have sudden surges, sudden peaks, you have the greatest growth response. So perhaps, doing this with nasal spray steroids might be a great way of extending the anabolic effect of the steroid.  I have a feeling that will turn out to be true.

MESO-Rx: Are “growth hormone releasing peptides” the next big thing in sports nutrition?

Dan: Well, the only one I know of is going to be a prescription drug. They found that the very short peptide, di- and tri-, I think the growth hormone releasing peptides of about 6-8 amino acids long, not all of it makes it through digestion, but a high percentage does so that you could do it orally. As to whether you would see a natural supplement, I don’t think so. It would be a drug and it would be regulated.

MESO-Rx: What supplement projects are you currently working on?

Dan: There’s an Indian herbal supplement calledForskolinthat increases cyclic AMP in many organs that might be beneficial for athletic performance. Of course, not everything is good about it; there’s bad things. Right now I am just working out the kind of dosages needed to get the best response. So, I guess, that is what I am working on this year.

MESO-Rx: What recent research do you find particularly interesting?

Dan: There’s a whole bunch of new research. Just this month they’re predicting a beta-4 receptor which has never been thought of before. It certainly explains why these synthetic beta-3 agonists are not working on humans for fat loss. So, maybe we don’t have beta-3 receptors but there’s a chance we have beta-4 receptors.

MESO-Rx: Before we wind up this interview, can you give us your brief comments on several popular drugs in the bodybuilding milieu?

Arimidex?

Dan: I think maybe only Michael Mooney used it. It’s six bucks a pill. I don’t know anyone…it doesn’t seem to be very readily available yet or in Mexico because I haven’t seen it.

MESO-Rx: Piracetam?

Dan: Now Charles Poliquin works with a lot of speed athletes where their performance depends a lot on reaction time. Now he believes that past a certain age, and he thinks that’s 26 years old, reaction time declines. He believes some of these smart drugs help at improving reaction time. Of course in bodybuilding and powerlifting, this is not really necessary. I’ve never really looked at any other smart drugs to see if there is some really odd one that may raise testosterone or growth hormone or lower estrogen.

MESO-Rx:Cytadren?

Dan:Cytadren, of all the anti-estrogens, is the one that people should be using because it really stops a lot of the conversion to estrogen at low dosages. In recent research where they were doing a conversion of androstenedione to testosterone, the addition ofCytadrencompletely block the conversion to estrone. As long as you can get it, it’s reasonably priced, but it’s hard to come by. You know, if it’s not in Mexico, you don’t see it on the black market here very often.

MESO-Rx: IGF-1?

Dan: There is a lot of IGF-1 anabolic action specifically in the muscle cells in response to exercise. I wouldn’t be surprised if people wised up and put injections of IGF-1 directly in the body part they are training. They would have more growth out of it rather than trying to do it systemically.

MESO-Rx: Growth hormone?

Dan: Buy it cheap. It’s no bargain at 20 bucks an I.U. It’s a great buy at 10 bucks an I.U. or less.

MESO-Rx: Clenbuterol?

Dan: There is a new one out of Mexico that is kind of cheap…cheaper than the rest. You know, that’s another one we never figured out, why is it the first time we ever used it, it worked fabulously, but it never works that good again, even if you go off it for years and then come back to it, it doesn’t work as well. I’ve never figured that out.

MESO-Rx: Thank you for the valuable information you shared with us today. But we know it is just the tip of iceberg of your knowledge. What is the status of your very informative Dirty Dieting Newsletter?

Dan: I am continuing it next year but shifting it over to another company, Essentials, Inc. I’m renaming the title and lowering the price; I will have fewer writers and less columns, and concentrate on one topic per issue, and go more in depth. Dirty Dieting will probably be renamed,‘Living Lean and Large‘. The 1998 subscription will be $49.95 ($39.95 with photocopy of student ID). Mesomorphosis readers can order it by calling Essentials, Inc. at 500-367-4531.
Originally published at MESO-Rx

“You know I don’t eat fish.” he said. “Well you would know if you bothered to read my books.” This was a typical Dan-style opening line as we sat in an Anaheim hotel during our first meeting.

Later, all Dan had to eat was catfish. That was when he was doing his second stint in Federal Prison in the last leper colony in the USA located on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi.

Back in 1986 when I first met Dan, he slept with a sawn off double barrel in his bedroom and rode his bicycle on the boardwalk. He used to feed his cat Dianabol, so it could survive in the back alleys of Venice.

Vignettes and memories of meetings and times spent with Dan seem endless. Like talking each evening through the vents in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego. Me on the 11th floor and him on the 12th, figuring out how to slither out of MCC on bail.

Later, we would have Monday night dinners at the local Italian restaurant in Carlsbad.

Then there were the slew of ladies, wife dikes from the army, crippled female body-builders – what woman wasn’t crippled after Dan had danced his Svengali dance on her head and in her body?

He was like nobody I had ever met or likely will meet again. We were partners in crime. Death, where is your sting?

The very word enigma was designed with Dan Duchaine in mind. Even his closest friends were never sure what side of Dan they would see. The outside world only saw one side, that of the mad scientist steroid guru looking for a way to shock the world with a new idea or discovery. Dan’s contribution to the sports and bodybuilding industry stretches much farther than most people realize and few are willing to give credit for his genius. I don’t use the term genius lightly. Love him or hate him, Dan Duchaine was one of the smartest people I have ever known. Without so much as a high school biology course under his belt, he understood concepts and theorized on aspects of human nutrition, biology, and chemistry that would leave many scientists speechless. He was not always correct in his theories, but his ability to open up new avenues of thought on a topic was unrivaled and unequaled. His creativity and curiosity in approaching a topic was his greatest strength, and he knew it. For better or for worse, Dan has probably had more effect on the sports supplement industry than any single person.

Dan’s public life regarding his legal problems, jail sentences, and out spoken views on steroids and other performance enhancing drugs are well known, so I won’t beleaguer his memory with those facets of his life here. What most people don’t know about Dan is that he had many sides to him no one would have ever expected. Dan had very few people in the world he considered close friends, and I was honored enough to be considered one of them. He was one of the most generous people I have ever met and was a very kind person in fact. He would lend money to friends in need never really expecting to be paid back. He paid all the bills for his only living relative, an aunt who resides in Maine. Dan had a sense of humor that could only be described as wicked and brilliant. Readers could get a glimpse of that humor in the many articles he wrote over the years in countless publications. Dan was more like a devious ten year old boy than an adult man at times. The world seemed to bore Dan, and like many ten year old boys, he would often entertain himself by making trouble. Most people thought he did it to be mean spirited, but I knew he did it out of some devious need for excitement. He would often tell others some bit of information which a friend had asked him to keep as a secret. When confronted with this he would often say “Well, yes I did it, but I just had so much fun doing it I could not resist!” and break into laughter. It was hard to stay mad at him. There was the time he stood up in a seminar of over 200 people and informed them that Mike Mentzer had just died. The room was aghast by the sudden news. When people found out it was not true, they were angry at Dan. Dan maintained a “good source” had told him about Mentzer’s demise just before leaving for the seminar. I knew better and accused him of just making it up to entertain himself and cause more trouble. He gave me a devilish grin and refused to speak about it. To me, Dan was a mixture of Andy Kaufman and Albert Einstein, with some Bart Simpson thrown in.

Dan tried to give off the persona of that of an uncaring loner, but nothing could be further from the truth. Dan loved children and it was one of his greatest wishes to be a father some day. I recall him telling me how much he wanted to be a father as we drove down the highway one sunny afternoon in LA. “What?” I said “the Steroid Guru want’s to be a father?” “Yes Will,” he replied, “more than anything in the world.” Sad to say, that wish never came true. Dan had many plans for the future and many talents most people were unaware of. He had recently started a small bike building company and had plans to build a new type of hybrid bicycle he had designed himself. The truth be known, Dan was sick to death of the bodybuilding industry and confided in me that if the bike business took off he would be happy to never write another article as long as he lived. Dan and I had also been working on producing a TV show together and he had made good contacts for pursuing that. The show was going to be sort of a crazy hybrid fitness show and 50′s style variety show with plenty of hot fitness babes thrown in for good measure (and ratings!). Dan had many hobbies and talents people never knew about and that was fine with Dan. He was a very private person, though not because he didn’t like people but because he didn’t know who liked him. He always felt like the odd person out. In an industry of unique individuals, Dan was the most unique of individuals.

As for what happened to Dan, Dan died in his sleep at his apartment from what appears to be natural causes. He was found Thursday, Jan. 13th by his close friend Shelley Hominuk. As most people know, Dan had always had various health problems throughout his life. He was born with polycystic kidney disease, a genetic defect that often leads to kidney failure. While in prison years ago, Dan suffered a small stroke which he recovered from. Last year, he had gallbladder problems which turned out to be gallstones and a possible ulcer. Most recently, Dan had been suffering with the flu which had plagued him for weeks. His health declined and his bodyweight dropped drastically. Typical of stubborn Dan, he refused to go to the hospital. When he didn’t answer his phone, Shelley became concerned and went looking to see if he was all right. Of course the rumor mill will try and place Dan’s death on some more mysterious cause, but by all accounts, including both the police and coroner’s report, Dan died of natural causes. Dan is, and will always be, my friend. Wherever you are Dan, I know you are making trouble and laughing at all of us. The world will not be the same without The Guru, Dan Duchaine.

More on The Dan Duchaine Situation

Hello all. As you all know, Dan Duchaine died of complications related to Poly Cystic Kidney disease last week. Many people have contacted me asking if there was a place they could send flowers or donate money to charity. So, I have set up a special fund with the National Kidney Foundation under Dan’s name.

Those interested in donating money to this fund can send it to:

The Dan Duchaine Memorial Fund
c/o Steve Evangelista,
National Kidney Foundation,
129 Morgan Drive,
Norwood MA, 02062

Steve is the CEO of the National Kidney Foundation and can be reached at:sevangelista@kidneymari.org if you have any questions.

This money will be directed toward research for people who suffer from Poly Cystic Kidney disease and I believe are tax deductible donations. I have opened the fun with $250.00 of my own money. Please feel free to pass this email around to others who are not on my mailing list but may be interested in this info. If you have a web site, feel free to post this on your site and/or send it out to people on your own mailing lists. I will be contacting the magazines shortly with this info also. In all honesty, Dan would have made fun of me for setting up such a fund but I felt it was the best way to make sure he did not die in vain. I have to think if there were better treatment options for Poly Cystic kidney disease, the infamous guru would be with us today making trouble for years to come… Regards – Will Brink

All the arrows pointed in one direction — to a drug that was almost mystical in its powers, that could turn men into supermen, that could heal the sick, that could make just about anyone feel younger.

And yet, remarkably, steroids didn’t have a true constituency. They cut across age and class lines and were undeniably effective, yet they were still subject to whisper campaigns and unflattering propaganda. Steroids needed a champion, a spokesman, a zealot. Duchaine had used them to reinvent himself. Now he wanted to return the favor and reinvent them for America.

One day, he dropped by Zumpano’s apartment overcome with excitement. “Jump on, I have something I want to show you,” he said.

Zumpano grabbed his knapsack and slid onto the back of the scooter. Once they were underway, Duchaine handed him a page of handwritten notes.

Zumpano started reading.

“We know this will make us a lot of enemies,” the notes began. “But although we’ll antagonize many of you, we thought we should tell the truth about steroids.”

“What’s this?” Zumpano asked.

“It’s the beginning of the book we’re going to write.”

A how-to guide for steroid users struck Zumpano as a good idea. He had started researching them to gain a better understanding of his own physiology and already had egg cartons full of files.

Why not share his knowledge? The reason for Sunday School was to keep guys from taking the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong doses. Granted, he wasn’t a doctor, but he knew as much as any MD he had ever met, especially the ones who preyed on the bodybuilders by trading steroids for sex. Why not put it all in a book? Why not empower guys to make the right decisions?

Duchaine had even bigger ideas. He saw it as a manifesto, a statement of principles regarding life and how to live it. He would be calling on a new generation to drop in and turn on. As they arrived on the pier at Santa Monica, Duchaine turned to Zumpano.

“This is how we’re going to be famous,” he said.

Zumpano climbed off the back of the scooter and looked at his friend. “You’re crazy, you know that, Dan?”

Duchaine wasn’t giving up. He read Zumpano a list of words he had picked out for the title. Bible. Muscle. Underground. Anabolic. Zumpano watched the Ferris wheel on the beach turn and tried to put the puzzle pieces together. “What about the Underground Steroid Handbook?” he asked.

An excerpt from the book entitled “Dan Duchaine: A Founding Father of the Steroids Movement” appears on the ESPN website.

Shelley Hominuk, a close friend of Duchaine, was interviewed for the book by Assael. Hominuk has been very vocal in her criticism of Assael stating that he not only sensationalized and exaggerated certain aspects of Dan’s life but twisted and fabricated others:

…these ESPN excerpts really didn’t have much to say about Dan and steroids. Instead, it exaggerated what we are led to believe what his personal life was like. How Dan was a drug dealing addict and took insane amounts of drugs and pills, which, those who were close to him know is a lie. I spent a lot of time with Dan and can confirm, it never happened. Actually, seeing Dan have an occasional beer was unusual. The book panders to the typical stereotype that anyone who is associated with steroids is screwed up and everyone pays the price.

Steroid Nation states that how Dan deliberately ruined not only his life, but also his wife’s by accidentally acquiring a flat tire on his motorcycle, and how he is to blame for his fictitiously named girlfriend’s plastic surgery tragedy. I can personally vouch that Dan was not psychic or a plastic surgeon. He loved these women very much, and blaming him for these terrible misfortunes, are low blows.

Shaun Assael has received a lot of criticism for attacking a deceased man who was unable to rebut accounts of his life.

Shelly Hominuk, QFAC:

I KNOW the story line as it occurred and Steroid Nation doesn’t cut it. Not on Dan’s professional life, especially not on his personal life, nor on some of the other story situations mentioned.

I know the truth of what is, and what was. I’m still alive to say what is what. Is Dan?

Anthony Roberts, Steroid.com:

And this is how the book goes…soft targets (dead men, people who can’t sue, etc…) are attacked and assaulted, while those with money and the ability to retaliate are left alone. It’s as gutless as it is obvious.

And that’s my main problem with Shaun Assael and his book. It’s safe. He attacks a dead man who has been nothing but honest throughout his short (and often tragic) life. Duchaine was a highly flawed man – but at least he was honest. And for his honesty, Steroid Nation attempts to kill his memory…but only succeeds in martyring him further in my eyes. But when it comes to showing some guts and telling the truth about people who are still alive (read: people who can defend themselves), the book takes the easy way out.

In spite of the critical book reviews, there is a lot of information about Dan Duchaine that has not been published elsewhere. However, the reader should approach the book with a healthy amount of skepticism given some of the criticisms of the portrayal of Dan by Assael.

I went to prison twice. I went to prison in 1987. There was a very odd time in my life, where I started doing a small retail steroid operation. I had a price list going out in the mail, and it grew out of having friends who were steroid dealers. They wanted to get mail-order customers. They mailed out their price list to people who had bought my Underground Steroid Handbook. For the longest time I said, “I’m not going to sell steroids because I don’t know where to get them.” Then there was a point in my life where I left my first wife. I left with nothing, because she took everything. I was a little low on cash, and had an acquaintance who had the ability to get anabolic steroids. So I said I’d throw my price list in with the others. I actually probably undercut the others, so my list was much more attractive. Mostly the customers were people who would buy $100 to $200 at a time. A couple things happened. I started getting a lot of things from a steroid dealer in Europe who wanted to move product through America. He extended me some credit, and I couldn’t do all the selling myself so I started wholesaling things out to other dealers. And Dianabol, the most popular oral steroid withdrawn from the market, both the generic and the trade name…I was looking around for a replacement. All of the replacements were very poorly done. You could pick up a tablet and write your name on a chalkboard. It was that bad. There were some tablets out of England and India that were very nice. Guys would show up at the L.A. airport and I’d get a few hundred bottles, but I’d never know when they’d come back.

Then I had the opportunity to work with someone I’d never met before. He was working with a small drug company in Tijuana that was making generic drugs for the Mexican market. They specialized in antibiotics like Tetracycline. We had a meeting one day and he said, “Could you use some Dianabol?” I said, “Damn right I can, but I’m not a drug smuggler.” He said, “We can get it over the border for you.” I told him that I was mostly a retail guy and asked him how much I’d have to buy. He said 5,000 bottles. I said, “I don’t know. That would last me a year.” Then I talked to a friend of mine, and we agreed that we could move it out of Mexico, so that’s how we started with this manufacturing company, Laboratories Milano. For a short time, my job was to dream up the kind of steroids they’d make. I’d find an example on the market and maybe change the packaging and labels. After a half a year, I noticed the U.S. Federal Government was starting to follow me around. And I thought, “This is not a hobby anymore.” So I left that whole conspiracy and left the steroid business and moved to San Francisco. I started working with Champion Nutrition. About the middle of 1987, the government swept up everyone who was ever involved with that conspiracy and I happened to be at the beginning of it. I did 10 months in prison that time.

After I was released on probation, I stupidly in about 1991 met up with a friend who had a longevity club selling GHB. The GHB supplement used to be available in health-food stores until the FDA realized it was really a sleep aid. It could knock you out in 20 minutes. Even though they can’t really ban a drug-only Congress and the DEA can do that-they can enact these weird Catch-22 labeling laws. So as long as you’re selling GHB in your state, they can’t touch you, but if you ship a bottle of a substance they don’t really like across state lines, there is no possible way to fulfill the labeling requirements. So we just didn’t put labels on the GHB bottles, with no claims whatsoever. We just called them research chemicals. The government kind of got pissed about that. Unfortunately it was supposed to be a finite thing. We had very little GHB left. We had a little Clenbuterol at the same time. It was an already established longevity buyer’s club. Unfortunately for us, one of the customers was an undercover FDA agent so I got my tit caught in the wringer. It was a stupid thing for me to do. Even though I can argue that it wasn’t worth 36 months because it wasn’t really an illegal drug, hey-I take the responsibility. I did my time. I learned a lot in prison about how to make money in legitimate avenues. I probably made more money in prison than the prison officials!

The full interview can be found here.