A SUSPICIOUS oily substance seized a year ago by Canadian customs has turned out to be an anabolic steroid, cleverly designed to evade dope tests on any athlete who might take it.
The World Anti-Doping Agency, which analysed the substance, is alarmed by its sophistication. 鈥淭his can鈥檛 be made in your kitchen or garage,鈥� says Olivier Rabin, the science director at WADA. 鈥淭his requires a facility and knowledge about chemistry.
The sample was seized in December 2003 from 31-year-old Canadian athlete Derek Dueck as he crossed the border from the US. It contains an anabolic steroid called desoxy-methyl-testosterone (DMT). It is the second designer steroid to make headlines. In 2003 a handful of athletes including sprinters Kelli White and Dwain Chambers were banned from competition after testing positive for a steroid called THG. Victor Conte, head of California-based company the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, was charged with supplying the drug to athletes and coaches. There is no suggestion of a link between the two cases.
Advertisement
Though chemical knowledge is needed to make DMT, the seized sample had not been purified, so any athletes taking it would have been exposed to the toxic by-products of its manufacture. 鈥淭he people making these products really don鈥檛 care about the health of the athletes,鈥� says Rabin.
WADA has no evidence that DMT has ever been used, but would routine tests have spotted it if an athlete had taken it? Testing is easy when WADA knows what to look for, but substances like DMT are designed to escape anti-doping tests. 鈥淭he rearrangements of the molecules to keep the active parts, change the inactive parts, and thus create 鈥榥ew鈥� molecules are virtually endless,鈥� says Peter Weyand of Rice University in Houston, Texas.
But Christiane Ayotte of WADA in Montreal has confidence in the dope-testing technology. She thinks DMT would show up in a test that separates compounds based on their molecular weight and chemical properties. Though DMT would not produce results exactly like known steroids, it would be close, appearing as a suspicious peak in the data.
And once an illegal substance is identified, officials can re-test any samples they already have. The law allows labs to keep samples for up to eight years, which should in theory deter athletes from taking designer drugs that might one day be identifiable. But in practice, says Ayotte, many samples which test negative are discarded after four months, partly because storage is expensive.
She believes that the most efficient use of resources is to concentrate on testing athletes for known drugs when they least expect it, rather than keeping samples. However, athletes often stop using illegal substances close to major events, and testing athletes outside competitions is expensive. 鈥淵ou have to know the whereabouts of all the athletes in all the countries in all the sports,鈥� says Ayotte. 鈥淵ou can bet that athletes who dope won鈥檛 volunteer all the information.鈥�
Catching athletes using new designer drugs will rely in part on tip-offs like the one that led WADA to THG, says Gary Wadler, an expert on sport doping at the American College of Sports Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana. 鈥淟ike any war, it鈥檚 a combination of intelligence and technology.鈥�
