I never had time to read this article before. It’s a 2003 Outside piece of participatory journalism about performance-enhancing drugs written by Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s very embattled senior strategist. It’s actually quite good. An excerpt:

“He handed me a bottle of pills. It was Stanozolol, an anabolic steroid that lifters use to add muscle mass. This is one of the drugs that sprinter Ben Johnson was caught using at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, where he was subsequently stripped of his 100-meter gold medal.

‘Where do you get this?’ I said.

‘A vet I know,’ he answered casually. It took me a second to realize he meant veterinarian, not military veteran. ‘Vets and Mexican farmacias, that’s where you get the best stuff.’ I looked at the label on the bottle—these were literally animal pills. They’re used to bulk up livestock, and they’re banned from greyhound racing, where they’re given to dogs to make them stronger.

‘Start with this,’ he went on, spilling out several doses. ‘Good base, can’t go wrong.’ I must have looked shocked, because he gave me a friendly punch in the arm and said, ‘You want to get big, don’t you?’

That night at home I sat staring at the pills. Veterinarians? Mexican pharmacies? I shuddered and threw them out. I knew the only way I could play this game was under a doctor’s supervision.

THAT’S WHAT LED ME, a few weeks later, to Dr. Jones. He was an internist by training and a specialist in the hot new field of anti-aging medicine, which involves helping people—who are always affluent, since these treatments are expensive—try to stave off the effects of growing old with a combination of nutrition and drugs, including HGH, steroids, and testosterone. A doctor I knew had tipped me off, with a wink, that Dr. Jones also used these drugs to ‘work with a lot of athletes.’

Inside his waiting room, I’d squeezed in next to the World’s Largest Man and a woman who I thought might be an actress—though I couldn’t be certain, since she was wearing a hat and sunglasses indoors. The jumbo guy was somebody I was pretty sure spent Sunday afternoons chasing quarterbacks on television. Such people were, I would come to realize, the core of Dr. Jones’s business: athletes and attractive women of all ages. Plus rich guys over 50. And the odd Playmate or two. Oh, and me.”