Something being decriminalized means very little for the safety profile of use. It's perfect legal to eat and drink nothing but hamburgers and soda, but it's still awful for you. Alcohol is legal in most of the world, heavy use of it is still awful for you.
Abusing a drug, again, in the medical/research context, refers to using something outside of medical supervision and in doses beyond the therapeutic dose. So yes, some of us are abusing peptides. But AAS users in this context are almost universally abusing them, as the therapeutic doses for drugs like test, deca, etc., are well below the levels used by people using them for their effects in muscle growth.
You don't have to spend long on meso to find a post of yet another person not getting bloods, downplaying their high blood pressure, etc. Or pretending their BP isn't an issue because telmisartan has gotten it under control. Professional bodybuilding and AAS use are highly correlated with an increase in mortality. It's hard to prove causality, but there is enough data around it and a plethora of mechanisms that explain potential causes, so the idea that gym bros are pinnacles of health despite their AAS usage is not an idea that stands on particularly firm ground.
This study analyzed publicly available autopsy reports of male bodybuilders under the age of 50 who reportedly died from cardiovascular-related events. A general Google search with the terms “dead bodybuilders” was performed on 10 February 2022. Six ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Observations by health-care professionals suggest that the use of anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) may be associated with lethal complications, but this has not yet been confirmed by controlled epidemiological studies. Here, we investigated the diagnoses (in the Swedish patient care records)...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Androgenic anabolic steroid users have an increased risk of dying and significantly more hospital admissions than their nonuser peers. Side effects of AAS and their metabolites were highly prevalent. Given the high rate of androgenic anabolic steroid abuse, these side effects are of public...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Non-therapeutic exposure to AAS appears to be an independent risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and premature death.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Roid rage is an unscientific term that does little to explain the complex way AAS use impacts the brain, but the idea that they have no neurological impact is simply false (see the studies I linked a few pages back), and for many users, it 100% manifests as increased aggression and anger. Many AAS users have specifically spoken about it, such as Dr. Mike Israetel. The idea that some of these AAS just make you calm and others are the real monster maker is not something we have any specific evidence for in the literature. Some people might experience no or minimal impact. Others might experience significant impact.
Look: No one here is saying to not use AAS. This community in general seems to very much fall in line with the idea that adults should be able to inject what they want in their body and make their own decisions about the trade offs of doing so.
But let's not act like AAS use is all sunshine and daffodils. There's not a free lunch, you're not getting to pack on additional muscle at significantly enhanced rates without negative impacts to your health, and in a statistically significant portion of AAS users, those impacts include increased anger and aggression. Underplaying the medical risks of AAS usage only encourages irresponsible use of them by leaving the users uninformed.