Comment · Thu, February 5, 2015 · Ceretropic
Fake herbal supplements. How to know?
Original post in this thread
NellucEcon · 34 points
A news article about the prevalence of fake herbal supplements recently made it to the front page of reddit. I couldn't find the original, so here is a similar article:
http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/news/20150203/retailers-fake-supplements
My question is, how do we verify the quality of products? Single drug compounds are probably easier to verify for a number of reasons. For example, adrafinil is a yellowish-white powder, tastes like death, produces an unmistakable urine odor, and has substantial subjective effects in responders. Of course this does not rule out cutting agents that might make dosing hard or impurities that could be unhealthy. In addition, this method works only for those drugs so obviously characterized. Compounds without a distinctive flavor or appearance would be difficult to identify. And compounds whose effects are subtle would be difficult to gauge by subjective experience.
All these problems are more severe for herbal supplements because they typically lack distinctive characteristics, particularly when crushed up and placed in a capsule. And most of their effects are subtle. And lab tests for authenticity require DNA testing.…
What they were answering
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u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Ceretropic
No, this is not a case of variability between two people. This is long term customers that get amazing effects from the dark dense kind, but get nothing from the light pink kind. I've sent single customers samples from 4 different batches, and there are clearly massive differences in effects between them.