He just swapped one addiction with another.

Congrats on 12 years! Good job on refusing the roids, continue doing that. That’s all the advice i got

Tell him that trading hearth health for muscle mass is not a recipe for a happy ending.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Prepping is a lot like religion. If someone asks about it, be willing to share. But don’t evangelize. He’s got a moronic POV. It’s obvious. Fact is that the type of situation he’s thinking about is the least likely to happen. I would laugh it off and not spend any more time on trying to guide him.

Roids are not the ticket to a happy life or successful prepping. Stay strong brother

Steroids can mean a lot of different things but more than likely if he ever comes off them he'll need another drug to help offset things like hormonal imbalances, if he has to come off if them because if supply chain issues then he might not have access to those either so he could be looking at all kinds of side effects. Bet he looks jacked though.

Do they not expire after a certain amount of time or can he just store them indefinitely? Aren’t they expensive too? Seems like that money could go to actual preps

You laugh at the absurdity of his logic. There is no logic present.

Ask him how much those steroids helped him during COVID or whatever the last natural disaster was where he lives (floods, hurricanes, fires, etc). Tell him to be realistic. If he's in a situation where 💪BIG ROID MUSCLES 💪 are an existential advantage, then he's already dead.

Most likely, the biggest physical advantages will be things like being in good enough shape to avoid requiring blood pressure medication, or being able to walk 5 miles to get someone to a hospital when the roads are all cracked up from an earthquake. Maybe being able to work a garden. Really boring, mundane stuff like that.

Google mortality of anabolic steroids users. These guys are swapping decades for cheat codes.

Not saying steroids arent dangerous, but they can be done with lots of harm reduction. I know a lot about the area, despite being a literal string bean in terms of muscle.

The issue with steroids in a real collapse type scenario is that one, steroids can run out. Not exactly easy to replace. You can buy bulk steroids that arent in vials already, called raws, but it requires a bit of money up front.

Plus the drugs needed to more safely use steroids need to be stock piled, as well as the products used to make the steroid vials.

Plus the supplies might go bad. Say the packaging for the sterile filters one uses to make steroid vials goes bad. Where are you gonna get more? I'll look into it, but you'd be out of luck eventually.

Plus, most importantly, steroid users and people in general hate cardio. I'd argue doing cardio is probably the most important part of any prep, in terms of bodily preparations.

Also, steroid gains are permanent, unless you are above your physiological limit. Most people outside of the professional weight lifters are not at this limit. You'll see glycogen stores go down, which steroids increase, and that is lost "weight" but it's not muscle. Plus people often either lose focus or interest in dieting slowly/properly and lose muscle when coming off steroids. But muscle put on when using steroids, assuming proper diet and activity to maintain the muscle level, are permanent usually.

If one sticks to testosterone, and uses things like dutasteride, has a blood pressure medicine on hand and measures regularly, a statin at the minimum, eats clean, and does cardio, it is a risky thing that is mostly at least somewhat mitigated. It's when none of these are done, people use things other than testosterone, and dont take care of themselves that one sees the stereotypical steroid users and their situations.

Forget prepping for a minute. Your friend has traded one addiction for another. Do not fall into their same trap.

Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with this?

Easy, you don't. It's not your problem. If you're offered steroids, just say no, you're not interested. You don't need to explain why or try to convince the dude to stop. It's not your job, he's not your responsibility.

But yes, the long-term health consequences are bad. If you stop, you lose all of those gains. And the gains themselves are largely cosmetic once you stop - you can't lift the same amount without the gear even though your muscles are still big.

doctor here. anabolic steroids will kill you. it won't be quick. you won't OD, but they will shorten your life significantly

If there comes a time when the steroids are no longer available, his muscles will atrophy and he will feel like shit until his balls start making T again.

Theres nothing morally wrong about steroid use. It doesn’t seem like a topic you’re knowledgeable about whatsoever, but it’s totally cool that you don’t want to take them - you probably shouldn’t.

That being said, from a prepping standpoint steroids are incredibly foolish to prioritize. Both oil solutions and oral compounds degrade over time. Suspensions, too. A stockpile of oil with .09% BA would last at most a couple years but even that could be pushing it. The potency would degrade significantly. The bigger issue really would be stockpiling the ancillary compounds required to manage AAS use and most importantly the recovery compounds used once you’ve run out. Without recovery, your LH/FSH would be crashed for the better part of a year or more, possibly indefinitely depending on your genetics. This means your testosterone would be extremely low which would be a poor psychological state to ride out the end of the world in.

Just keep laughing at his logic. Sometimes entertainment is free. Enjoy it.

Kinda one of those situations where you can leave and let be. Can phrase it as a joke 'more for you brother dw about me' or as a serious conversation with him but storing a few years of medicine is a goal for me personally, as well. It could very well be important for him to have afterward, and it's no skin off your back. Just emphasize that you can't eat steroids, so focusing on other areas of prep and learning skills like gardening and canning are going to help him survive.

It's rule #1 of zombieland.. if he can't see that..

Well for him if he is juicing yes he would want to prep some as coming off them will have withdraw and unintentional consequences.

For you and basically everyone else hell no, bad idea

People prep for their fears. He fears being overpowered? Outmatched? And sees his "gains" as essential to his prep (forgetting that all that mass without serious cardio will make you slower and more vulnerable - and having a 5k+ calorie diet will be crippling for actual prepping).

Not sure you want to be his shrink, but he needs therapy.

just ignore them. and hope you do not have to deal with his dead body after he has a heart attack

That guy is NOT clean anymore 😂 your bro needs to go back to rehab

Have taken them so can speak on them. It's not like you see in movies or TV where you take some steroids and magically you get jacked. You have to bust your ass while still taking them to get the improvements you would expect from steroids.

Simply taking them and working out like you already do will probably net you a slightly better fit shape. But to bulk up you need diet, steroids and hard work. Most people who do a cycle have an off cycle regiment to control your low t and estrogen. Once you stop your body will be only making estrogen and depending how long you were on them nothing to next to nothing t. If you google cycles for steroids you can find what one talking about.

In short tho if you continue to work out as hard as you did on them you will keep most of the gains you had. But being able tompush yourself on them will be alot harder when off and the recovery needed will be more. When I stopped but continued to work out I kept my probable 85% of my gains.

But seeing as past rehab I'd avoid it bc it ends up being like an addiction in of itself.

How many professional athletes have died prematurely because of steroid use?

Like any addictive substance, we need to ask "How am I going to feel when it runs out?" Your friend is eventually going to run out of his drugs and then where is he gonna be? I don't know much about the withdrawal from steroids except for muscle shrinkage, but would guess that there's going to be a mental letdown due to weakness at the very least. Is he going to freak out when he suddenly isn't Captain America or can he deal with it?

I agree that if he keeps it up you might need to distance yourself. That's just not a smart person to be around in highly stressful, potentially dangerous situations. Good luck to you!

Mighty bold to be talking about prepping to someone hooked on roids. You may not think he knows where you live, but it's a simple matter of him deciding to discretely follow you home one day.

Just to clarify, you are not talking about TRT, you are talking about gym candy?   Maybe your friend has been looking at the special forces guys and their steroid use from the GWOT era. For soldiers it was very helpful for recovery, strength, and endurance - for prepping it would create more problems than it could ever solve. 

I just can't believe anyone would think this would be a good idea as a prep. TRT I would agree with if you were prescribed.  

His logic is sound. If he's on steroids when things get bad he needs to stay on steroids during emergency times. He doesn't want to stack steroid withdrawal on dealing with chaos.
However there is no way he could stockpile enough roids to stay on them long term if the infrastructure of steroid production and delivery is disrupted. So his best course of action would be to detox now so he can survive roidlesssly in the future.

Also no amount of roided out will help you survive a gunshot wound or even a simple infection. Steroid mind will make him intolerable as survival cohort and likely get him excluded from survivor communities. So as an overall prep strategy it's pretty bad.

No roads in the apocalypse