Steroid Drugs: Sales
(asked on 29th May 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions his Department has had with the Home Office on enforcement against the illegal online sale of anabolic steroids.
The Department collects data, through the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS), on the number of people in structured substance misuse treatment, including those reporting a problem with anabolic steroids and other image and performance enhancing drug (IPED) use. However, people seeking help solely for steroid misuse, and not for alcohol or other drug misuse, may not be in structured treatment, depending on local commissioning arrangements, and would therefore not be captured in NDTMS. Where steroid misuse is linked to broader substance misuse, it would be recorded in NDTMS. As a result, NDTMS does not provide data on the prevalence of steroid or IPED use.
Data on anabolic steroid use is collected through the Crime Survey for England and Wales, published by the Office for National Statistics. The latest release provides an overview of the extent of, and trends in, illicit drug use in the year ending March 2025, and is available at the following link:
Anabolic steroid use is not recognised as a distinct diagnostic category in current classification systems, which limits health services’ ability to identify, record, and monitor cases in hospital data. Although some diagnostic codes relating to steroid misuse do exist, they are broad and do not reliably capture anabolic steroid use or its associated complications. As a result, data on hospital admissions linked to anabolic steroid use and related complications is not held.
Enforcement against the illegal online sale of anabolic steroids is a matter for the Home Office under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Officials in the Department of Health and Social Care work closely with the Home Office to tackle the harms that all illicit drugs cause.