Stuart Stevens speaks from experience. He's not some university researcher or anti-doping official speculating on performance-enhancing drugs and sports.

He applied the cream, ingested pills, stuck needles into veins. He filled his body with every letter of the anabolic alphabet, taking human growth hormone (HGH), erythropoietin (EPO), testosterone and anabolic steroids.

Improved sight. Disappearing scars. Year-old injuries that healed in two weeks.

All in the name of research for an article Stevens — political consultant, television producer, author — wrote for Outside Magazine. All consumed over an eight-month span in 2003.

Total cost: more than $10,000.

Total gain: immeasurable insight.

And now, as performance enhancement takes center stage in sports more than two years later, Stevens is stuck somewhere in the middle. He would not recommend this strategy to anyone — "Oh, God no," Stevens says — and still ...

"It is sort of a mixed message," Stevens says. "I did it. I didn't die. I didn't kill anybody. But I'm still rabidly anti-drug."

An avid skier and cyclist, Stevens watched cross-country skier Johann Muehlegg keep two of three gold medals from the 2002 Olympics when he tested positive after his third race. Intrigue grew into an idea. Stevens found plenty of positive and negative literature on the subject, but nothing that explained the actual effects.

So Stevens hooked up with an anti-aging doctor near his home in Southern California. They worked out a plan that introduced one drug to his body at a time.

They started with HGH, injecting it in Stevens' stomach, at the cost of about $850 a month. Sun blotches that used to dot Stevens' arm faded away. The scar on his forehead disappeared. His reading glasses suddenly never left their case.

Testosterone came next, rubbed like cream onto Stevens' stomach. Then he started injecting himself with EPO, which gave him migraine headaches and cost $3,000 for 20 weeks. Stevens says he wouldn't take EPO again if somebody paid him to, but he would continue HGH if it wasn't prohibitively expensive.

Lastly, Stevens added an anabolic steroid. He took deca-durabolin, and despite being ridiculed as soft on steroid message boards, watched a year-old cycling injury to his left knee heal within two weeks.

He gained 15 pounds, from 195 to 210, without lifting weights. It brought on an "Incredible Hulk" feeling and gave Stevens a "werewolf effect."

"Most of the stuff wasn't really frightening," Stevens says. "This stuff is fairly transparent in the sense that you don't feel different. You can just do more. But with steroids, there's an immediacy to it. I felt like I swallowed a freight train."

The problem now — other than degrading vision and workouts that aren't as easy as they used to be — is what happened afterward to Stuart Stevens. Suzy Stevens, Stuart's wife, says "it's not like he grew green hair or anything."

This is what he learned.

"I could see that if you were a really great athlete, it would be highly addicting," Stevens says.

"You can see why cheaters cheat. When you do something like I did, you pick up a newspaper and you read that baseball is saying that taking steroids doesn't help you hit a baseball. It's just gibberish. Of course it does."

Stevens says honesty is paramount but lacking from professional sports and anti-doping officials. He need look no further than his own experience to know performance-enhancing drugs are readily available — either expensively through legal channels or less so through black markets. There are safer ways to take them, Stevens says, along with techniques to limit side effects.

He points to a future filled with a notion he calls "male menopause." Where drugs like HGH will be part of an "anti-aging drug phenomenon" for baby boomers intent on slowing down the aging process.

"The problem is it becomes a mixed message, particularly for young athletes," Stevens says. "You need to stress the angle that it takes all the fun out of sports.

"You know that you can take a steroid and pass the Major League Baseball test. It's the biggest joke in the world. It's not really so much a drug test. It's an IQ test.

"So then sports becomes more about how much are you willing to tempt fate and tempt death than how fast you are or how good you are. The test shouldn't be: Is it going to kill you immediately? You have to find that middle ground. You have to be honest. You're probably not going to drop dead. But we still don't know what will happen."

Stevens is closer than most to finding out.

Greg Bishop: 206-464-3191 or gbishop@seattletimes.com