They won't show up. When I was a Battalion commander I had to have my Command Sergeant Major select 10% of my command at random for drug screening, and Rangers being Rangers, a lot of my soldiers were jacked to the gills on pharma grade Testosterone, Deca, Winstrol, you name it, and gobbling Dbol, the "breakfast of champions" at 50-60mg a day orally (faced with a fire team of Airborne Rangers, armed to the teeth, tossing a list of what they want on the counter, what do YOU think an Iraqi pharmacist is going to do?). Hell, sometimes I think they spent more time building gym equipment we didn't have, planning their cycles, and keeping the mess sergeant's freezer full of questionably obtained protein sources - Goat milk, eggs, cheese, canned tuna and chicken, and, of course, frozen goat meat.
As brother
@PTFC can no doubt attest to, the gas chromatography equipment necessary to detect steroids reliably is cost prohibitive for an army Lieutenant Colonel with a budget big enough to support roughly 600 men (line battalions are bigger, they can have up to 1000 men - But when your feet are your primary mode of transportation you don't need all of the Transportation Corps officers and NCOs to maintain a large motor pool, and God help the armorer (or anyone else, for that matter), who tries to take a man's personal weapon or a fire team's crew served weapon away from him in order to do depot level maintenance on individual or crew served weapons assigned to men who are in the physical condition of Olympic athletes, trained extensively in both hand-to-hand combat and the real kind of combat situation you find yourself in when you run out of ammo - Pick up the heaviest or sharpest object you can find and prepare to smash skulls. Depot level maintenance was non-existent, and the dumbest Ranger in my Battalion was a better machinist / welder / armorer than any "qualified" armory NCOIC could provide us. Our individual weapons were far too highly customized, zeroed, sighted, scoped, and lovingly maintained to perish the thought of swinging one like a club, or fixing bayonets and using them as pseudo spears.
Correctional facilities are in the same boat - They would love to be able to test for steroids, but the equipment to do so is so expensive that they can't come up with a cost-benefit analysis that senior management will approve. Unless you're an NCAA or professional athlete, or an Olympic athlete, you'll never have to worry about being tested for steroids - The testing facility doesn't have the gas chromatography they'd need to allege a positive result and make it stick, so they don't even bother recording Testosterone levels, Estrogen / Progesterone levels, or make any notes on the state of the subject's HPTA axis. If you've got high blood pressure and elevated liver values they just attribute it to the ungodly amounts of mankind's favorite self-medicament you're undoubtedly using to sleep at night - Booze.
V/R
- b2g