Where did Turinabol come from?
Chlorodehydromethyltestosterone was first described in 1962 (Doerner and Schubert, 1962). Soon after this point, the East German pharmaceutical company Jenapharm released the drug for prescription sale and medical usage, under the brand name Oral-Turinabol (Llewellyn, 2011).
turinabol bodybuildingOral-Turinabol was subsequently exploited by East Germany in a state-sponsored doping programme designed to accelerate athletic performance at the Olympic Stage (Ungerleider, 2001).
The atrocity of the East German state-sponsored doping program was only fully unrelieved after athletes medical reports were released in the early 1990’s. At the height of the program, over 1,500 doctors and scientists were employed, and perhaps as many as 10,000 athletes were affected. The vast majority of athletes were unaware of the oral anabolic steroids they were taking because they were described as “vitamin pills that would compensate for their lack of nutrition” (Costello, 2013 ). Doping was carried out on male and female athletes, some of which were as young as 10 years old, and particularly for female athletes, resulted in permanent masculinization of body parts (Ungerleider, 2001).
Over 1,000 sportsmen and women are thought to have experienced serious long-lasting physiological and psychological damage from the doping programme and a compensation fund of £2.5 million was set up by the German Government to compensate these athletes for the horrors they were unknowingly subjected to (Costello, 2013 ).
Due to all of the negative press of the use of Oral-Turinabol by the East German state-sponsored doping program, the original manufacturer of Oral-Turinabol (Jenapharm) discontinued the drug.