I have to totally agree with this. It's easy for those of us who have done their research to blame those who haven't, but you have to assign some responsibility to the retailers AND to the supplement manufacturers.
I am an attorney, and though I don't practice in product liability, I am frequently shocked when I see the way some of the products are packaged and marketed. Look at all the warnings that are on the side of a bottle of ADVIL, and compare that to what you see on most prohormone/designer steroid bottles. Some companies are better than others, but Havoc is particularly bad in this regard. I don't have my bottle in front of me at the moment, but it basically says "STRENGTH - MUSCULARITY - LIBIDO" and talks about how the ingredients have been used "safely in Japan for decades," and has some generic warning about keeping it out of the hands of children, and don't use if you have high blood pressure or other illnesses, etc. That's the same basic warning you'd see on jar of creatine or other benign supplement.
What is someone supposed to think after reading that label -- assuming they have no prior knowledge of steroids? You would think that it's f'ing GOOD for you. You would think that it's some kind of alternative supplement that those super healthy Japanese people use, and you would take "2 to 3 capsules daily as a dietary supplement" like the label says, MONTH AFTER MONTH.
Seriously, is this at all defensible? And people wonder why everything keeps getting banned? The 14 year old kid above was lucky that an AM member stopped by his house that day or God knows what kind of harm he would have suffered. If MY kid came home from the "vitamin store" with something like that, my very non-lawyerly instinct would be to drive over there and shove the bottle down the throat of the SOB that sold it to him. But most parents will call the media or their congressman, and next thing you know there's a ban, and the rest of us and the industry suffer because some greedy companies were eager to make a buck at the expense of the health of uninformed people.
I know that most of the people on this board are responsible decent folks. If YOU were in charge of package design for a supplement company, wouldn't you at least put in big red letters "NOT FOR SALE TO PERSONS UNDER 21" on it? And add a whole bunch of use guidelines and warnings and at least MENTION PCT? Yes, you might lose some customers, but it would be the right thing to do AND better for your company in the long run.
Sorry for the rant, but this has been on my mind for a while now and when I hear stories like those mentioned above it just gets to me!
:damnit1:
fftopic: