Over 2.7 million people clicked on a video that promised the unvarnished truth about steroids in the UK. What they got was a 20 minute panic attack wearing a Vice hoodie, jabbing a needle into your attention span and calling it journalism.
It is the perfect modern media snack. Gritty, sweaty, alarming. And absolutely hollow on the way down.
Early on the case gets made that steroid use among young men has tripled since 2019. That stat gets repeated three times, each time layered over a slow-motion shot of someone drawing a milky liquid into a syringe. The number feels heavy, the kind of thing you’d screenshot and send to a worried parent. But nobody in the documentary asks a follow-up question. Tripled from what baseline? Are we talking 100 users to 300, or a genuine cultural shift? What portion of those users are getting blood work, managing estrogen, running proper post-cycle therapy, versus the ones sticking their endocrine systems in a blender? Vice isn’t interested in that. The number is there to spike your pulse, not to inform.
What 2,791,969 people came to hear was the scary story, and Vice delivered. There’s a moment where a 23-year-old warehouse worker from Manchester flexes in a bathroom mirror, admitting he’s never had his liver values checked. The camera pans down to a plastic bag of blister packs bought from a guy at his gym. The documentary lets the confession sit there, heavy as a dumbbell, then smash-cuts to a police raid. It’s breathtaking. It also teaches you precisely nothing you couldn’t get from a Daily Mail headline in 2016.
This is the Vice formula that racks up millions of views: film people in vulnerable, often grim circumstances, add a flat voiceover, season with anxiety, and serve without a single actionable takeaway. The production dresses up as investigative reporting but functions as emotional pornography. You finish the video feeling worldly and concerned, because the lighting was moody and someone cried, but if I asked you to explain how testosterone esters actually work or why gynaecomastia happens, you’d stare blankly. Brainrot. Polished brainrot.
Buried in the middle, a gym owner from Birmingham says something genuinely sobering. “Most lads coming in have no idea what they’re putting in their bodies. They just want to look like the lad on TikTok.” That line lands. It should be the launchpad for a real conversation about education, harm reduction, maybe even regulated supply chains that would starve out the bathtub brewers. Instead, Vice pivots to a former user describing suicidal thoughts post-cycle, and the takeaway becomes “steroids will ruin your life,” not “abruptly crashing your natural hormone production without a plan will make you want to die.” The agenda is clear: treat the substance as the villain, not the ignorance around it. That’s a choice. It’s also a lie by omission.
One thing that stands out is how thoroughly the documentary avoids anything that looks like a blueprint. No mention of regular blood panels. No interview with a sports endocrinologist explaining how to interpret free testosterone versus SHBG. No segment on enclomiphene or HCG for recovery. The advice is essentially: don’t do it. That’s the intellectual equivalent of telling a teenager to just say no, then walking away smug. 2.7 million people, many of them probably dabbling or curious, were given a horror movie when they needed a manual.
Vice is controversial because it flirts with taboos, but the controversy is always surface-level. They’ll show you the needle going in but not the spreadsheet tracking injection frequency and carrier oil half-lives. They’ll let a tear roll down a cheek but refuse to talk about estrogen control because that would sound like “endorsing” use. So you get the guilt without the guidance. And the algorithm feasts.
The argument breaks down like this: It’s not that the dangers aren’t real. It’s that a documentary this polished, with this much reach, had the opportunity to transform anxiety into understanding. It chose the alternative path where you walk away with a lump in your throat and an empty head, ready to share the link and move on.
Let’s name the genuine epidemic here. It’s not just grey-market steroids. It’s the total vacuum of trustworthy information at scale. Young men are being fed unrealistic physiques by algorithms, handed powerful hormonal tools by WhatsApp dealers, and given a moral scolding by media outlets who profit off their fear. Meanwhile, the people actually navigating this world safely, the ones who treat their bodies like a biochemistry project instead of a Russian roulette game, are invisible. Vice won’t film them because they’re boring. They’re not injecting in a dirty toilet; they’re pinning in a clean bathroom after swabbing with alcohol and logging their millilitres in Notion.
At one point, the narrator says, “Something has to change.” That’s the closest we get to a solution. It’s a hollow echo, a placeholder where a plan should be. And it’s the perfect summary of the Vice approach: name a problem, stir your guts, then abandon you.
You’re not actually learning anything about mitigating risk, understanding androgen receptors, or the difference between pharmaceutical grade and underground lab. You’re learning to be afraid. That’s entertainment, not education.
If you made it through the full 19 minutes and 40 seconds and still ended up Googling “steroids UK” afterwards, just know that’s by design. The video was the hook. The follow-up search was the abandoned responsibility.
I don’t get paid to keep you scared. Every Friday I send out a breakdown of what lurks beneath the latest health panic, the actual data, the strategies that don’t make good TV but do keep you intact. No moody shots of someone crying in their car. Just the blueprint. If you’re sick of brainrot, you might find it useful.
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