Romario Dos Santos Alves always wanted to be a body builder, and he modelled himself on his favorite superhero – the Incredible Hulk. To achieve this, he started injecting synthol, a mixture of alcohol and oil that accumulates under the skin, giving the appearance of muscle, but it didn’t go as well as he had hoped…

Romario first started injecting synthol when he moved away from his home town three years ago. Before he started using, he looked like a normal, healthy man.

“I saw some really big guys in the gym with huge arms and I started to make friends with them,” he says. “They introduced me to synthol and I got excited about the results – I lost control.”

Soon, he’d pumped his biceps up to a whopping 25 inches.

He received mixed attitudes on the street – some congratulated him for what they thought took a lot of hard work, and some were scared and disgusted by his look.

The negative opinions took him to a bad place, mentally, and it was these attitudes that drove him to attempt suicide while his wife was pregnant with his daughter.

He even tricked his wife into injecting him with synthol in places he couldn’t reach. “I told her there was no problem with it – that it left the body after a short time.”

Soon, normal needles wouldn’t do the trick anymore. “My muscles started to solidify and I couldn’t even inject my arms – they were full of rocks,” he claims. Romario needed bigger needles, the kind that vets use on bulls, to get the synthol in.

When his wife discovered what the synthol was doing, she threatened to leave him. “I decided to fix my ways and I never again wanted to take any drugs,” Romario says. “We went through a really hard time and almost starved.” The synthol began to give him constant pain and he suffered from kidney failure because of toxins in the oil.

He was hospitalised, and the doctors thought they might have to amputate his arms, but found a way around it. Although he resolved never to take drugs again, he sometimes finds himself slipping. “Two weeks ago I bought a substance called estigor – a horse hormone,” Romario admits. “‘My mind started remembering things that I’ve gone through and I thought that I couldn’t do it – I couldn’t give in to temptation again.” Romario still aims to be a top body builder, but wants to achieve his goals without the use of synthol.