Lance Williams reports:
On Berkeley’s Holy Hill, a seminarian at the Pacific School of Religion inquires about steroids to control her weight. Despite stomach bypass surgery, she’s up to 310 pounds, she says.
The Chronicle has withheld customers’ names out of privacy concerns.
In Orlando, a 38-year-old contractor suffers from erectile dysfunction, a side effect of the drug he takes for depression. The anti-ED prescription his doctor gave him doesn’t help. He seeks steroids instead.
And in a town north of Seattle, an eighth-grade boy wants steroids for school sports. If he can get his weight up to 170, he thinks he can make the football team.
Here, from the business records of a Florida wellness center that was closed after a 2007 law enforcement raid, are the faces of the nation’s infatuation with performance-enhancing drugs – people who sought to buy steroids, human growth hormone and other powerful prescription drugs over the Internet to address deeply felt problems and concerns.
[…]
For an inquiry into the who and why of the nation’s demand for steroids, The Chronicle reviewed six years of transactions and 66,000 customer records from the Palm Beach Rejuvenation Center, focusing especially on a sample of about 2,200 people whose contact with the clinic included detailed information about why they sought the drugs.
Read more in San Francisco Chronicle
That’s nice of them, but I wonder how many people whose files they have obtained believed that their data and details were covered by confidentiality and privacy protections.