She just wanted six-pack abs. So in the summer of 2003, Dionne Passacantando, a 17-year-old high school cheerleader, gymnast, and vice president of her Allen (Texas) High School class, made a decision she regrets. She bought anabolic steroids from a boy on the school football team.
“Nobody frowned upon it,” she says. “It was easier for me to get those than it probably was to buy beer.”
But after injecting herself with Winstrol every other day for five weeks, she became suicidal.
“I was the last person in the world you’d think would use anabolic steroids,” she says.
Her story is part of a much larger picture. The Mitchell Report, which detailed steroid use in major league baseball, noted that while steroid use among high schoolers seems to be declining, it is still estimated that 3-6 percent of students nationally have tried them. That means that, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of high school students are using.