Flying back from the East Coast on Sunday I saw an ad for "Cenegenics," an upscale anti-aging program aimed at older, wealthy men who are--well, wealthy. The ad showed a 69-year old physician, Cenegenics founder Jeff Life posing in jeans and no shirt, the better to emphasize his bodybuilder-like leanness and muscularity.

Now, I'm not usually one to call 'drugs' on well-muscled types just because they have better builds than I do (even if they're almost twice my age), but when I saw that the program featured something cryptically referred to as "hormonal optimization" I had to wonder. Here's Dr. Life in action, hawking his program: ...and here he is getting grilled on FOX News, stammering a bit as he tells us, between references to vitamins and minerals, about his use of HGH, testosterone, and the necessity of getting these hormones back into the 'normal' range:

I'm of two minds about this: on one hand, Dr. Life is just doing exactly what lots of unscrupulous doctors already do for gym rats who come in complaining about "low energy," "depressed sex drive" and other code-words for "Can you hook me up with some good juice, Doc?"

In Bigger, Stronger, Faster, the filmmaker scores a prescription using just this verbiage. It's a don't-ask-don't-tell situation, with the doc presumably justifying it by thinking "If I don't give them to him, maybe he'll wind up taking something really harmful and kill himself." So, you know, everyone's doing it.

Moreover, there is some question about the real extent of the much-touted harmful effects of steroids. Maybe they present serious health risks; maybe they don't. And of course women take steroids all the time in the form of birth control pills, and no one's assembling Congressional task forces to confront that particular 'epidemic.'

When it comes right down to it, though, I prefer Rocko at the gym. Rocko drives himself across the border a few times a month and deals 'roids out of the locker room at Gold's. He may be this close to a drug-smuggling conviction and 3-5 in the big house, but at least he's not pretending to be optimizing anything other than the size of your biceps and your confidence with the ladies.

There may come a time when steroids and other prescription hormones are downgraded to 'lifestyle' drugs, as widespread and seemingly innocuous as snooze-inducing Ambien, floppy-no-more Viagra, or mood-lifting Zoloft. Certainly a program as ubiquitously-advertised as Cenegenics is a step in that direction.

Given the precedents, it's tough to launch a rational argument against it. But to me, Cenegenics smacks of sleaze.