The instant Hervey left the room, Fitton took over. "Lads, the dosages are a bit high," he said of Hervey's regimen of 20 five-milligram tablets a day for six weeks. "If you feel more inclined to taking just two tablets a day, I'll buy [the rest] off you." As Fitton recalls, almost everyone in the room accepted his offer. Naturally, the subjects did not show appreciable strength gains at the end of the study. Fitton,One strength athlete, who now works for an NFL team, showed Fitton a bottle he'd purchased for $500 that purported to contain gorilla growth hormone extracted from the animal's brain. After examining the bottle, Fitton informed the lifter with a laugh that he'd been duped into buying a few bucks' worth of Deca. "I asked him," Fitton says, " 'How common do you think gorilla brains are? It's a bloody endangered species!' "Fitton believes that if drug testing occurs out of competition, and if the tests are truly unannounced, "the only sure, safe thing an athlete can do is human growth hormone, and a bit of testosterone, and monitor their testosterone levels." And where's the chemist's creativity in that? "I'm just glad we had those years," he says, "when sports were fun."
