Comment · Wed, November 27, 2013 · Ceretropic
Cerebral Health Pyritinol (New Test Results)
Original post in this thread
MisterYouAreSoDumb · 137 points
We have finally identified the substance that Cerebral Health was selling as pyritinol, which has sent one person to the hospital, and caused adverse reactions in half a dozen other people so far. The results are very surprising, as I never would have guessed it. It turns out the substance is diphenhydramine, also known as Benadryl. Diphenhydramine has anticholinergic and serotonergic effects, and has been known to cause seizures in higher doses. So essentially people were overdosing on a deliriant. You can read reports of people taking large doses of it online, and it does not seem like a very pleasurable experience.
So far Cerebral Health has not taken any steps to address the issue. I've gone back and forth with the owner Doug on Longecity for a while now, and the exchange has pretty much been a PR disaster for him. Not only has he been rude and dismissive, but he has threatened myself and the lab manager of the first lab we used to do the testing with litigation. On top of that, he insulted the lab managers education, and generally has been a total asshole throughout this whole incident. It's definitely not the…
What they were answering
Toptomcat · 5 points
Well we already let the community know the moment we found out. The post is stickied to the top of the subreddit, and there are multiple posts on Longecity.
The nootropics-forum-reading community is an unusually dedicated and almost certainly small subset of the nootropics-purchasing community. Not everyone who owns a car surfs /r/cars. And while nootropics are a sufficiently 'fringe' interest that I'd be willing to bet a large fraction of the nootropics-purchasing community read nootropics forums, I'd be shocked if forum-readers make up a sufficiently large portion of nootropics-purchasers that your measures to date will reduce the expected risk of CH products to all nootropics purchasers such that it won't be an issue. You aren't choosing the no-risk option by publicizing on nootropics forums: you're choosing the option that risks the FDA being informed by someone inside the community, and that risks people outside the community getting poisoned by bad drugs.
I'm not sure what the downstream effects of letting the FDA know would be, either. I think they would probably be bad. It's definitely a difficult decision. But it isn't really yours any more. This is not a tiny, exclusive club of drug nerds: right there, on the sidebar to the right, it says there are 27,000 people here. Do you really think that you can post this kind of thing in a subreddit with that kind of…
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Ceretropic
That's a good point. I hadn't really thought about the risks of those outside the community having the same thing happen. I just figured that most nootropic users would hear about it here or Longecity. However, that may not be the case.