As a fellow ectomorph attempting to have a life after significant orthopedic injury -- with a living that depends on my ability to use my body effectively, I absolutely get why Royce used. Some of the history of the War on Drugs and the rhetoric used to gain control of things that aren't nearly as big a deal as others should really be considered when passing judgement about steroid use.
I was a student at the Academy back in the day, before the UFC's. Royce was 170 pounds soaking wet; perhaps the least competitively athletic of the Gracie brothers, but still a helluva natural athlete. Buddy of mine weight-trained him for the UFC's, getting him up to a whopping 176. At which weight he went against guys like Kimo and Shamrock...who were roided out beasts of considerable size and strength differences. One guy in the school actually tried to get Royce on the gear, and he declined. For years. Choosing to rely on his jiujutsu, rather than size and strength. On preparation by rolling with his brothers, rather than developing strength gains in size.
While on steroids, your body heals faster from new injuries (i.e., training injuries that come from ramping up for competition), and hurts a lot less from old ones, allowing you to work on rehabbing them while developing for your upcoming trials. Steroids can also help someone recover from wasting disorders, gaining much needed muscle mass to aid with recovery of immune function. (immune systems work better with more red meat on your bones).
Steroids have a place in healthcare, but because of the ridiculous public furor over them, stemming from a bored war on drugs, many physicians are hesitant to prescribe them to patients who would clearly benefit from them.
Anyone remember Nancy Reagan and the War on drugs? Remember what an abysmal failure of a time they were having actually restricting the flow of money and drugs back and forth with South America? Declaring war on steroids provided them an easy target; there wasn;t a lot of trafficking going on, and aside from body-builders and athletes, there wasn;t a big demand base for them...easy target for a PR coup in the war. Lyle Alzedo blaming his brain tumor on steroids provided them an east poster boy to craft a sham victory with, since they weren't winning where it counted. Some of us remember that Alzedo was also using many other illicit substances in gross amounts, many known to have waay more adverse effects than roids.
I got mono and EBV as a teen, which left behind a strain of cryptic tonsillitis. Which led to me being ill for a week, healthy for a week, for several years (can't take the tonsils out while actively infected, which was pretty much all the time for 7 years...by the time they'd book a room, the infection was active again). During which time I damn near died a couple times from pneumonia, septic infections (from throat to ears, ears to blood, blood to heart & brain), and asundry other little unpleasantries. Immune function is tied to muscle mass. After many years on anti-biotics and getting ravaged by the wee little bugger bacterium anyways, mine was trashed. And I looked like a starving concentration camp survivor.
A year after excision of the tonsils, I still couldn't gain weight. So they put me on anabolic steroids. I gained mass, gained health, and got to have a life again. They were used often in cases like mine, as well as cancer survivors, and general post-op to aid in tissue regeneration from surgery. Old lady gets a hip replacement? Stick her on deca-durabolin for 6 weeks while she's in Physical Therapy...it'll help keep the inflammation and pain down, promote fast cell replacement and wound healing, and help her develop the muscles that wasted while she was down for the count prior to and immediately after surgery. Now docs are scared to make cancer/surgery Rx's, out of fear they'll be burned at witch stakes by angry peasant mobs, worked up over baseball hero's and public opinion fervor...formed by PR campaigns.
MMA fighter on roids kills his family and himself, and it's all over the news. Public goes insane chomping at the bait saying, 'See? Steroids are bad, and only bad people use them so anyone proividing them or consuming them must be bad people". But I can crack the newspaper on just about any given day to find drunks running red lights and ruining lives, shooting at cops til the cops shoot back, knifing someone in a bar, beating their wives and kids, etc. Daily. Anyone racing to make booze a class 3 controlled substance and felony to buy, use, or posess? Anyone on these sites getting all worked up over an MMA celeb going out for a coupla beers with his buds?
If I listen to my brother-in-laws rhetoric, all Muslims are innately bad people, and should be exported post-haste; executed if they resist. It's an ill-informed, ignorant view that fails to take into account all the facts prior to making assumtions. But it doesn't keep him from reacting negatively to anything having to do with Islam in the U.S. This anti-steroid mania is just the same thing, tilted at a different windmill.
Royce is a genuinely good person who made a choice to prolong his income by training through his injuries, instead of letting them stop him. So now we should round him up with those darned muslims, and ship them all out of the states? This kind of blanket negative altercasting is a silly thing, and it's getting done by otherwise perfectly intelligent and reasonable people. Stop it. Please. It's silly.
D.
Place was packed, but he made his way around the room and fine tuned everyones technique. 
