MUSCLE-BUILDING MISHAP SENDS 4 TO HOSPITAL AFTER DRINKING BREW.

Byline: The New York Times

Using a recipe from an underground pamphlet on steroids for bodybuilders, four young Long Island men cooked up a caustic potion and drank it, hoping for a chemical high and bigger muscles.

They ended up in the hospital with severe burns.

``They were mixing sodium hydroxide, the base used in Drano, with a mild organic acid used to make paint thinner,'' said Joseph Haas, an engineer with the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation. ``But it didn't come out the way they expected.''

Haas was among a team of experts who removed the chemicals, none of them illegal, from the bedroom of one of the four men who drank the brew late Tuesday night. The four were taken to the hospital, with two of them in critical condition.

What they hoped to produce was a substance called gamma hydroxybutyrate, but the pH level was too high, making it too caustic, Haas said.

Among some bodybuilders, the substance, also known as GHB, is used as a powerful anesthetic. ``It is taken with the notion that it burns fat and causes the release of growth hormones in the body,'' said Dr. Charles Yesalis, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and a specialist in performance-enhancing drugs.

When the four men were heating and mixing the brew in the bedroom of James Raman, 20, at his home on Jerusalem Avenue in Massapequa Park, his parents, who were downstairs, thought he was distilling water for his fish tank, according to the Nassau County police.