The story behind the FDA raid of Nootropics Depot

...continued...

Now a little backstory here... we did sell tianeptine years prior. I explained it in the podcast, but I will reiterate some here. I went through a bad depression when I was younger, and almost took my life on a number of occasions. Coming out of that depression is the entire reason I got into nootropics in the first place. I wanted to understand how my brain worked, and why I went through what I did. I wanted to see if I could help others going through the same thing I did, and help them come out the other side alive. Had I taken my own life on any of those occasions, I would have missed all the beauty this life has to offer. I wouldn't have met my amazing wife, or been able to bring my crazy beast of a son into this world. I would have cut short a life that I now know has so much more to offer than I did in the depths of my depression. I didn't want anyone to have to face that same choice I did, and certainly didn't want them making the wrong decision. My experience with depression is why we brought out tianeptine in 2014. I wanted people to have access to pure and properly tested stuff. I didn't want people to harm themselves by mislabeling like other people had in the community. I also wanted to understand its mechanisms and how to improve it. That's exactly what we did when we released tianeptine sulfate in 2015. We were the first to release that version, and the reason we did it was due to pharmacokinetics. Tianeptine sodium is a very "peaky" compound. It absorbs quickly and leaves the body quickly. This is why we developed the sulfate salt. This lowered the peak effects and extended out the AUC. This made it much more functional. Now remember, at the time everyone thought the main mechanism of tianeptine was as an SSRE, or selective serotonin re-uptake enhancer. It seemed like a cool novel mechanism, and when taken at appropriate dosages, it was like magic for many people. I had hundreds of people private message me here on Reddit telling me their stories, and thanking me for bringing it out. Many of them had similar stories to me, and said they were going to take their own lives as well, but then were now on the road to recovery because of tianeptine. It was literally a weekly occurrence, with people crying while relaying their stories to me. It was exactly the thing I had hoped to achieve when I first got into nootropics. However, like in many aspects of life, the bad actors ruin it for the good ones. This is exactly what happened to tianeptine.

The early days of tianeptine were a bunch of biohackers trying to understand this new SSRE mechanism, and how we could improve it. Anyone around at the time will tell you it was a very different time in this space. It's a time that many old timers fondly miss. We were constantly bringing out novel compounds, and trying them out on ourselves. /r/Nootropics was a lively place with like-minded people all coming together to do community-driven personal research on cool shit. It was a great period that likely will never be repeated. Well just as most good times come to an end with a single misguided event, so too did ours. Now tianeptine is a great compound, when used correctly. That means taking 12.5mg to 25mg doses. However, then some people found out that if you took a higher dose, it binds to the opioid receptors. Someone made a post on Longecity saying that if you took a gram or more of it, you would get high. At the time I remember seeing that post and thinking: "Dude, stop popularizing this idea that people can use it to get high! You are going to just make more people do that!" I even said it in a post on Longecity and on here. However, the cat was out of the bag at that point. It set off a chain of events that would lead to not just the tianeptine side of things drastically changing, but the nootropics community as a whole. People started to abuse tianeptine. No longer was it the people fighting depression looking for a novel way to help them out of their situation. It was junkies looking for a fix. It happened quickly. Tianeptine became our number one selling product. What came with it was a group of people that were clearly fiending for it. There were still the same people that had been there before, that were using it properly. However, they were now dwarfed by the people abusing it. It grew so hard and fast, it became half of our entire revenue. I knew it was still helping people, but I also knew it had grown into something I did not like. This is when I made the difficult decision to stop selling it. I didn't want to be a part of what it had become, but I was also torn. I knew us pulling out would have a negative effect on the quality standards of the industry. I knew that we would be removing access for those people that were not abusing it. However, I also knew I just had to make that decision.

We stopped selling tianeptine sodium in January 2017. We made the decision to cut our revenue in half because we didn't want to be associated with it anymore. It was becoming a nightmare dealing with the crazy people buying it, and it was pulling my team and I away from our main mission of advancing the lab testing and quality control standards of the industry. Here, I'll link a post that shows you what I mean.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/4upt35/bad_order_first_out_of_a_dozen_no_coa_from/

This shit started happening more and more. Look, that guy even said he reported us to the government on on that post. In fact, it wasn't long after this that an active federal investigation was opened into me. Perhaps this guy did set things in motion much sooner than we realize... Even so, tianeptine was being sold by a bunch of vendors at this time, like Powder City, New Mind, Nootropic Source, etc. Hell, even Amazon reached out to us and asked us to start selling it on there!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/4tn2cl/psa_a_lot_of_nootropics_depots_products_can_now/

Yes, you could buy tianeptine on Amazon at the time. This was summer 2016. By January 2017, six months later, I decided I was no longer comfortable selling tianeptine sodium. We, of our own accord, decided to cease sales of it. There were too many people abusing it, and I never wanted to be associated with that. The idea that I was involved in "gas station heroin" at any point is so beyond fucked, it's insane! Why would I willingly cut our revenue in half if I just wanted to sell tianeptine to junkies? I wish that Longecity post never happened, and people never figured out you could abuse it. I realize that is naive, and that it would have been figured out at some point, but it really is a shame. My mission is to advance the lab testing and quality control standards of this industry, educate and advocate for consumers, and push this industry forward. I couldn't do that if my life was consumed with this tianeptine shit, so I got us out of it. We thought maybe just selling the sulfate form would be fine, but eventually I realized tianeptine as a whole was toxic, and we got out completely. By 2018 we had dropped all forms of tianeptine. So when the government raided our facility in December 2021, Nootropics Depot had not sold tianeptine for many years prior. So what about the press release?

After these congressmen wrote the FDA asking what they were doing to combat this gas station heroin issue, this is when I got caught in the crossfire. They found the only active case that had to do with tianeptine. Then a bunch of people who's names I never heard of, and who certainly were not sitting on the other side of the table from me when I met with the government multiple times, decided to put their names on a press release characterizing the situation in that manner. What many people don't realize is that the statute of limitations on 21 USC 331 is 5 years. This means the government can enter your facility, and charge you with crimes for things that had long since ceased. When they entered our facility in December 2021, it has been 3 years since we had sold tianeptine sulfate, and 4 years since we had sold tianeptine sodium. However, that's within the statute of limitations of 5 years. This means that while saying we sold tianeptine is a true statement, we were not actively selling it at the time the government came in. However, it was a case that was open at the time of these congressmen writing the FDA, and they needed a public "win" to show they were doing something about it. It didn't matter that we were not selling tianeptine and kratom shots in gas stations. It didn't even matter that we willingly stopped selling tianeptine many years prior. I was the patsy that was around at the time that they could hold up and point to as the bad guy.

So long story short: no, that press release is not an objective view of the situation. If that was the real story, Nootropics Depot wouldn't still be operating to this day, and I would have been charged with felonies; which I was not. There is a lot more to say, but I have already written enough for now.