Rick Collins: Steroids should not be treated the same as heroin
“I was an apple in an orange crate.” When Rick Collins went to law school not many people there looked like him. As a personal trainer and competitive bodybuilder he wasn’t buying suits off the peg like his classmates.
It’s this start to his legal profession that has seen him became a world-renowned legal authority on testosterone and other performance and image-enhancing drugs.
In his extensive career he has served as lead defense attorney on countless criminal cases and doping allegations involving anabolic steroids and related drugs nationwide and internationally, including the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) scandal that shocked professional sport in the early 2000s. (BALCO, founded by Victor Conte, supplied performance-enhancing drugs to a number of household name athletes, including Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Marion Jones.)
He also serves as General Counsel to the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), is a legal advisor to the Pro League of the International Federation of BodyBuilders (IFBB), and his New York-based law firm, Collins Gann McCloskey & Barry PLLC, represents numerous companies in the sports nutrition industry.
It’s this experience and insight that makes him the perfect expert to explain where he thinks we are going right and, critically, when we have gone wrong in legitimising and demonising different drugs based on their impact on performance, health and public perception.
