Like many teenage boys, Jeff Rutstein started to lift weights as a teenager to attract girls. He was 5-foot-6, 150 pounds at the time. In six weeks he added 20 pounds of muscle. Within two years, he weighed 190.

If that doesn't raise a few red flags in your mind, then you've already flunked your first steroid test. Rutstein, after failing to get the desired results simply by pumping iron, turned to anabolic steroids.

Three and a half years later — after "gushing" noses bleeds and episodes of 'roid rage, after getting hauled away to an asylum, after stealing from his parents to support his habit, after repeated attempts to quit — he quit for good. He spent a year lying in bed, depressed. In the end it was exercise again that got him moving again, this time without the drugs.

Rutstein, now 40, has looked on with dismay as America has slowly awakened — Bud Selig-like — to an underrated drug problem among its youth. Last year he wrote a book on his own steroid experience — "Steroid Deceit" — as a warning to youths and their parents.

"It's such an addictive drug and no one realizes it," he says. "I don't want parents to go through what I put my parents through. I almost died."

Parents have been as slow as Major League Baseball, professional wrestling and bodybuilding to recognize the presence and real dangers of 'roids, which are addictive, deadly and often pave the way to using the other drugs.

How bad are steroids? Consider the plight of pro wrestling and bodybuilding, which are rife with steroid use. According to USA Today, 65 pro wrestlers died between 1997 and 2004 who were 45 years old and younger, 25 from heart attacks or other coronary problems, many with enlarged hearts. When wrestling star Eddie Guerrero died of heart disease at 38 late last year — from heart disease that included a hardening and narrowing of the arteries, enlarged organs, etc., brought on by years of steroid abuse — pro wrestling decided to start random testing.

Meanwhile, bodybuilders are turning up ripped and R.I.P. — Charles Durr, Don Youngblood and Paul DeMayo, as well as powerlifter Anthony Clark, all died within a one-month period last year at the ages of 45, 51, 37 and 38, respectively. Three were related to heart problems. The Bodybuilder.com Web site says of DeMayo, after noting he is 5-foot-10, 270 pounds, "Paul DeMayo works hard for his physique . . . Hopefully we'll see much more of him in the future."

Probably not.