Anabolic steroids were made illegal in the United States primarily because of concerns about widespread nonmedical use among athletes and teenagers, not because they fit neatly into existing drug control frameworks. Congress passed the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990, placing steroids on the Schedule III controlled substances list despite objections from the DEA, FDA, American Medical Association, and National Institutes of Health, all of which testified that steroids didn’t meet the traditional criteria for a controlled substance.
The Sports World Acted First
The push to control steroids started not with lawmakers but with international sports organizations. In 1967, the International Olympic Committee formally banned performance-enhancing substances, defining doping as “the use of substances or techniques in any form or quantity alien or unnatural to the body with the exclusive aim of obtaining an artificial or unfair increase of performance in competition.” At that point, however, no reliable test for anabolic steroids existed. Scientists developed one in 1973, and steroid testing was first implemented at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics.
For the next decade, steroid scandals kept building. The most explosive came in 1988, when Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, then the fastest man in the world, tested positive at the Seoul Olympics. The fallout triggered a major Canadian government inquiry and reshaped anti-doping policy worldwide. In the U.S., the scandal amplified existing Congressional concern that steroids were spreading far beyond elite athletics and into high school gyms.
Why Congress Overruled Medical Experts
Under the original Controlled Substances Act of 1970, a drug had to cause physical or psychological dependence to be scheduled as a controlled substance. Steroids didn’t clearly meet that threshold. When the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990 was proposed, the DEA, FDA, AMA, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and National Institutes of Health all testified before Congress against criminalizing steroids the way other controlled substances were treated. Their recommendation was education, not criminalization.
Congress disagreed. Lawmakers pointed to a combination of health risks and the scale of nonmedical use, particularly among young people. Testimony before Congress highlighted that steroids could cause heart disease, stroke, liver damage, skin problems, and aggressive behavior. Adolescents who began using steroids in middle school and continued through adulthood faced elevated risks of cardiovascular and liver complications compared to adult-onset users. The psychological effects also concerned legislators: aggression, hostility, and a withdrawal syndrome that could include severe depression when long-term users stopped abruptly.
Surveys conducted around this period confirmed the scope of the problem. CDC Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance reports and the annual Monitoring the Future surveys estimated that between 1.8% and 4.9% of high school seniors had used anabolic steroids at least once. Across all high school students surveyed from 1993 to 2011, average lifetime use rates ran from 2.5% among Black students to 4.4% among Hispanic students. For a substance with serious health consequences being used without medical supervision, those numbers were enough for Congress to act over the objections of the medical establishment.
How Steroids Are Legally Classified
Schedule III is the middle tier of the federal controlled substances system. It includes drugs considered to have moderate potential for abuse and accepted medical uses. Steroids sit alongside drugs like ketamine and certain barbiturates in this category. The classification means that possessing steroids without a prescription or distributing them carries federal criminal penalties: up to 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for a first trafficking offense, doubling for a second.
The legal definition of an anabolic steroid hinges on four criteria established by Congress. A substance qualifies if it is chemically related to testosterone, pharmacologically related to testosterone, not an estrogen, progestin, or corticosteroid, and not DHEA (a widely sold supplement that was specifically exempted). Once a substance meets all four criteria, the DEA has no discretion. It is automatically classified as Schedule III with no further evaluation of its abuse potential or addictiveness.
This is unusual. Most controlled substances go through a formal scheduling process where their pharmacology, abuse potential, and risk profile are individually evaluated. Steroids bypass that process entirely. If the chemistry matches testosterone and the substance isn’t in one of the exempt categories, it’s a controlled substance by default.
The 2004 Expansion
By the early 2000s, supplement companies had found a lucrative loophole. They sold steroid precursors and prohormones, compounds the body could convert into active anabolic steroids, as over-the-counter dietary supplements. These products were chemically and functionally similar to banned steroids but weren’t explicitly listed in the 1990 law.
The Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004 closed that gap. It expanded the definition of anabolic steroids and added dozens of specific compounds to the Schedule III list, including androstanediol, androstanedione, and various forms of androstenediol. The law also gave the DEA an administrative pathway to add new substances through rulemaking rather than waiting for Congress to act each time, making it harder for manufacturers to stay one step ahead by tweaking molecular structures.
Steroids Remain Legal With a Prescription
The ban applies to nonmedical use. Anabolic steroids still have FDA-approved medical applications and are prescribed regularly. Doctors use them to treat low testosterone, delayed puberty in boys, muscle wasting from cancer or AIDS, certain types of breast cancer in women, endometriosis, and osteoporosis. The legal distinction is between a physician prescribing a controlled dose for a diagnosed condition and someone buying testosterone derivatives from an underground lab to build muscle faster.
This dual status, illegal without a prescription but medically valuable with one, is part of what made the original scheduling so contentious. The medical community’s objection in 1990 wasn’t that steroids were harmless. It was that criminalizing them was the wrong tool for the problem, and that the drugs didn’t behave like the addictive substances the Controlled Substances Act was designed to regulate. Congress weighed those arguments against the reality of teenage use, athletic scandals, and documented health harms, and decided the threat justified criminal penalties.