I have posted some of his before . . .
Dan was a very interesting contributor. I thing I read about everything
we wrote strong views, a kind of iconoclastic person. He was into
recumbent biking if memory serves me. He may have tried much on
himself but he had not have physique to show for it from the pictures
I remember seeing. He may have published a steroid book that was very
popular, perhaps the only one at theme.
I remember following all this 'infighting Kneller and Arnold (one went to jail
also contributed regularly. on the old usenet rec.fitness.weights which was
before Google. I never posted, it was way over my head as as most the
postings here.
Again, Dan was very entertaining, as where a lot of them.
Hopefully some of the older members can chime in here who remember this special
time in history.
I've already written my views on the importance of Dan Duchaine in the 80's thread, as well as other threads, but I'll add a little bit here.
There already was an established base of knowledge about steroids and other PED's before Dan, within the lifting community and athletics in general, passed down by word of mouth from one lifter to another over many years since the 1930's. But Dan was the first to codify all that disorganized information and misinformation into one small guide, the Underground Steroid Handbook, which first came out in 1981.
To guys today, that one little handbook might seem like nothing, because we have unlimited information available to us over the internet. But growing up in the 1980's, that little handbook, and the observations of ourselves and other lifters, was all we had. And it, and the rest of Duchaine's writing and theories, remain the wellspring from which so much of what we do and take for granted today came from. Dan was a seminal figure to those of us trying to figure out the pharmacology of bodybuilding. Dan was reckless, cruel, flawed, and may not have always been a great human being. But he was undoubtedly a great man regarding pushing the frontiers of human achievement, and everyone who has come after him owes him a great debt, whether they realize it or not.
Like many of us, Dan chose the wrong calling in life. His real strength was as a writer, and if he had concentrated on that from the beginning, who knows where he would have ended up, or what he could have achieved. But like many of us, because of his own passions and insecurities and low self-esteem, he chose bodybuilding, for better and for worse. He never had the genetics to be a great bodybuilder, although I do remember him competing in the NPC Couples Championship, and I remember seeing pictures of that, although I can't seem to find them now.
But his desire to become a better bodybuilder led him to seek out all the information he could find on steroids and other PED's, and his genius enabled him to contribute greatly to that body of knowledge. His reckless nature led him to experiment constantly on himself and others, helping some to achieve greatness, and inevitably hurting others, including himself. Dan's own addiction to Nubain certainly hastened his own death, although polycystic kidney disease ran in his family. But then Dan was always very aware that the clock was ticking for him, and that he had a limited amount of time to accomplish something in his life. And he certainly succeeded in those accomplishments, attested to by the fact that we are still remembering him with reverence twenty years after the man's death.
Near the end of his life, after he had suffered from the effects of a stroke, kidney disease, Federal Prison, and Nubain addiction, his passions did shift to recumbent biking, and some half-hearted attempts at having a family and some kind of normal life. But he will forever be remembered for pushing the boundaries of bodybuilding pharmacology far beyond where they had been before, and setting the stage for others (like Kneller and Arnold, both of whom briefly did prison time) to push things even further.
Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who came before, and takes things for granted that their elders had to discover only by trial and painful, sometimes lethal, error. Dan may not have physically been a big man, but his impact on bodybuilding drug use has been gargantuan. We all stand in the shadow of what Dan, and other explorers, discovered and imparted to us.
I hope that Dan is resting in the peace that he could never find in life.