FDA soft ban on NMN sales and a lot more
Slowly at first...
I didn’t intend to write today but this one deserves it. Unlike 99% of everything I write, this will have a lot more opinions, even though it is based on analysis than everything else. Twitter user @Carl_Jurassic was nice to tag me in this tweet, which will lead us to a rabbit role.
Pharmaceutical companies and otherwise corrupt “people” have been impeded to patent certain substances because of a decades-old law, forbidding companies to patent any form of chemical or substance that naturally occurs in our bodies or in nature. A pesky law in the way of centralized power and massive profits. So it should be of no surprise after 2020 and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, deep seeded corruption found a way, and now they are either removing access or attempting to patent said substances.
This is even more egregious to any sensible person by the simple fact that NMN is one of the few treatments that achieve success in severe pneumonia cases of SARS-CoV-2, not only that, an “off-label” to speak use of NMN is rescuing a lot of people with fatigue or brain fog post-infection, and it is very helpful to kick start the bioenergetics of a sizable portion of Long Covid/ME-CFS afflicted.
The banning of useful vitamins shouldn’t be a surprise, especially when there is financial interest from some pharmaceutical company.
The FDA has been attempting to remove access to cheap, powerful treatments, especially in regard to SARS-CoV-2 for a long while. One of the strategies this monument to corruption uses is issuing warning letters left and right, deeply affecting the market for months until a legal battle ensues. This was the case in July 2020 with NAC. Vitamin B6 (the one mentioned above) was proposed as a possible treatment to ameliorate a Covid infection as early as 2020.
In these warning letters, the FDA invoked the Drug Exclusion Provision within the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which states that a dietary supplement cannot contain:
an article approved as a new drug; or
an article authorized for investigation as a new drug, antibiotic, or biological for which substantial clinical investigations have been instituted, and for which the existence of such investigations has been made public, which was not before such approval, certification, licensing, or authorization marketed as a dietary supplement or as a food, unless the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, has issued a regulation, after notice and comment, finding that the article would be lawful under this chapter.
This was despite the fact that FDA has tacitly permitted the sale of NAC supplements for many years. There are well over 1,100 non-Rx NAC products on the market, typically sold for liver health, detoxification, antioxidant activity, and immune system support. The ingredient is very safe, and until the June 2020 warning letters, the FDA had no issues with it.
The above is an excerpt from this article, and I highly recommend you read it in its entirety. This “letters” tactic was also used on another supplement, which is also beneficial for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 sequelae, and it is one of the pillars of my “brain stack”. Piracetam, is a supplement that has many other uses you can read in the linked substack. The following text and quotes are from LF at LFBioHacking, but apparently, the site is dead, but credit where it is due.
The silent phasing out of racetams in the U.S. market has been apparent for years now, but has ramped up recently. Phenylpiracetam has been effectively wiped from the clear net, and other racetams are quickly going out of stock. This is occurring despite their legality in the United States being unchanged. To understand why this is happening, and how people are still acquiring racetams legally on the clear net, we need to consider a variety of recent changes in the racetam supply chain.
Causes of Racetam Shortage
So, why are racetams drying up on the clear web despite no recent changes in their legality? Well, the reasons for this are both domestic & international and have developed over the past few years.
Warning Letters
The FDA began sending ‘warning letters’ to racetam vendors in 2018, following a series of crackdowns on the sale of supplements claiming to treat medical conditions. Pure Nootropics, a well-known racetam vendor, was amongst the vendors who were mailed warnings. This event indicates that the FDA was made aware of the growing popularity of racetams which was occurring around this time since traffic volume was one of the metrics mentioned in the FDA transcript.
Customs seizures
Users began reporting seizures of piracetam and other racetams by their country’s customs around 2018 as well. Piracetam was not on the prohibited substances list of most of these users’ countries.
Alibaba crackdown and foreign labs
The Chinese government issued a blanket ban on a variety of unscheduled substances in 2021. While most of the substances banned were legitimately high risk and/or illegal, such as SARMs, Cardarine, Modafinil analogs, etc, others were also caught in the ban. Phenylpiracetam was the only racetam to be explicitly banned in the Alibaba crackdown, but vendors soon started withdrawing other racetams from the site.
Many racetam vendors do not synthesize their products in-house, but rather buy in bulk from foreign laboratories on sites like Alibaba. This sudden stoppage in production marked the beginning of the end for racetam availability.
Few vendors have spoken publicly about the foreign lab shortage, possibly as to not reveal to their customers that they are reselling bulk piracetam. Racetam supply began to dwindle from this point onwards up until today, in mid-2022, where most racetams are simply unavailable on the clear web.
The FDA does a “soft ban”, big market players respond accordingly, supplies dwindle, and prices skyrocket, and this is one of the main reasons one of the best “therapies” and interventions tripled in price since 2020. Peptides.
The push against peptides has been increasing in volume and “legal strength” over the past 5 years, and while sourcing is not difficult, pricing is, BPC-157 one of my favorite peptides went from mere 25-31 US Dollars to cost between 60 to 100, other peptides suffered a similar increase in pricing. Restricting the compounding and usage of peptides is self-serving for pharmaceutical companies, and sets a high bar of entry for anyone without deep pockets since the approval of a peptide requires a monograph and the cost is roughly 300.000 dollars. And to end this substack, I will leave you with a small list of substances under the threat of suffering a similar fate of everything discussed here.
At least a third of this list has extensive, decades worth of research on how beneficial they are in the treatment of diseases or health maintenance. There is a huge push from pharmaceutical companies, by funneling money using “donations” to restrict the usage of all of these substances, so they can change a single molecule, and sell at 10x the price. The same people pushing these, are the ones heavily invested in a “green” world.
At some point in the very near future, you may have to draw a line.
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Can't we just drag the FDA into the woods and.....
A significant chunk of that list at the bottom of your article has applications in treating C-19, or more specifically, C-19 spike protein pathology. Artemisia, curcumin, glutathione, melatonin, quercetin, tea tree, just from a cursory glance. Oh, Q-10/ubiquinol too.