Is Ephedra Legal or Banned?

not only that , but people are KNOWN to misuse things from time to time. - it's no wonder that some of them die.

The ban of the ephedrine alkaloids, is true. However, the extract is still legal as far as I have heard. alkaloids and the extract are different,being the extract is much less potent.
Personally I think all drugs should be legal, I think there would be a lot less crime, and a lot less money spent on good people going to jail.They could spend the money they saved on our children's education and rebuilding and doing maintenance on their dilapidating schools, and school buildings. if drugs were legal, we would probably have no deficit, no huge businesses failing, there would be a far stronger economy.who cares what everybody else does "live and let live" I don't know what that say's about all of us who feel this way, but that is how I feel.

I too used ephedra and lost 24 pounds and had boundless energy. Now, I have gained back 10 pounds and can't seem to lose it. Have you found anything compaarable to ephedra?

is this from over dose? i have heard that people can over dose on ephedrine but how much would you need to intake (tablet form) to overdose?? thanks

I absolutely agree with you. Someone wrote it helped lose weight and kept it of for so many years, BUT, not they need it again.
Whoever thinks that pills help them lose weight are wrong, your will does. Pills are destroying your liver. In this world we live in now where all kinds of medications are needed and available for every simple cold to start with, you don't need to be destroying your body knowingly and willingly just to lose weight. There's a lot healthy options out there.

What people don't fully understand is that ephedrine was taken off the market because it is a threat to prescription medication. When people take Ephedrine they lose weight. When people lose weight the obesity problem in America decreases which gives less diabetes, heart disease and a huge array of other fat associated diseases. The FDA is persuaded by the drug companies for these decisions. It's all based on money and greed.

Yes some have died due to abuse. The number of deaths with Ephedrine comes even come close to the number of deaths with prescriptions meds.

they use ephedrine to make meth.. that's one of the BIG reasons it was banned unless it is for medicinal purposes. i take prematine tablets nodoz and baby aspirin. it's perfectly safe as long as you're not an idiot and don't abuse it. i wouldn't recommend taking it before a workout either. i only do in the morning when i wake up and an hour or so after my workouts which is 6-7 hours after i wake up. it works great for me. sometimes it causes the jitters a tad bit but so do energy drinks and they make you FAT

Where do you get your ephedrine? I can't find it anywhere anymore.

Out of millions of users, 157 people died over a several year period. How many could have been teens? And under the same criteria, many people have died using Red Bull--almost ALL of them teens. But they died because they were stupid. Kids died sniffing PAM. Why hasn't it been banned? I can die by eating enough rocks. Ban rocks! Almost 1,000 children drown in back yard pools in the US every year--10 times the number in accidental hand gun accidents, and 100s of times the number that EVER died from ephedra. And yet, I have never heard ONE PERSON suggest that private pools should be banned. Hmm, seems we are selective with our concern for children. --James

I want to share my experience and knowledge on this subject so that people don't get the wrong idea about things based on unverified myths.

Some have previously pointed out the claim that "You don't need a pill to lose weight, you just need to count your calories and exercise." I would have thought it would be common knowledge in this day and age that there are people who's metabolism is naturally low which makes it very difficult for them to lose weight even when following the oft quoted mantra from above to the strictest degree.

In life, there are many ways of achieving the same goals each carrying different pros and cons. Shouldn't it be an individual's liberty which one of those paths he thinks is best, which set of pros and cons he will choose?

If anyone is familiar with the harm principle, it states that the only right a government has to interfere with an individual's personal decisions is when those personal decisions cause harm to someone other than himself. Now, one could argue that using potentially harmful drugs harms others than the user by causing sadness in those close to him. This is a weak argument though, for think of this analogous situation. A son decides he is not Christian anymore and it hurts his mother who is a fundamentalist Christian. It causes deep pain in her because she believes that her son is going to go to hell for eternity. If we follow the same line of logic, the logic that says an individual harms those he cares when he uses drugs because it could cause him harm which saddens them, we would have to conclude that the son should have to be a fundamentalist Christian to take away his mother's pain, because I guarantee you the mother who believes her child is going to hell hurts just as bad as the one who's child is using drugs.

But the real reason people favor prohibitive laws against substances doesn't have to do with any kind of reasoning as complex as that, it is because we live under the rule of a daddy government and as a result, the majority are indoctrinated to believe that it is "just right" that a government should "protect" its citizens by placing laws on potentially harmful substances, and they take it for granted that their government is a worthy judge of OK substances and NOT OK substances.

One of the biggest drivers of stigmatization of particular substances or activities is that you are always going to hear the horror stories about drugs, but you'll seldom hear the life/quality of life-saving stories. There is multitude of people who use pain medication who have been given back their ability to enjoy life, to have occupation, to be free from suffering for every one person who overdoses. And in reality, things could be much better than they are if it weren't for the always-err-on-the-side-of-under-treating-pain climate that the recent DEA "crackdown" on "mis-prescribing" practices has created in medicine, which creates a situation where people in quality-of-life-robbing pain can't get meds legally and end up hooked on black market substitutes exposing them to the risks of impurities, a narrow range of options usually only consisting of H, an unsteady supply, and arguably the worst of all, they are left without the advice of a professional who can work with them to arrive at the best possible treatment.

So Ephedra has risks... Everything has risks, working your ass off at the gym and counting calories every meal and still being unable to lose a healthy amount of weight has many risks... Heart disease, joint wear n tear, depression, suicide.

Honestly, most people commend our daddy government's drug policy because their life has not placed them in a situation that conventional means have not been able to solve. Take a person who believes in our prohibitionist policy, put 5 years of bad fibromyalgia pain on his belt and the depression that comes from seeing your life fall apart, that comes from not being able to perform at your job as well as before, or at all, the pain of seeing your relationships deteriorate because you can't go out much anymore, and because you aren't as jubilant as before, and you want to be really bad, but no matter how hard you try, you can't crack anything but a fake-it-til-you-make-it smile. Even the most rigid conservative who's been indoctrinated to the highest degree into thinking that our drug laws are just will break when he has been to more doctors than he can count, none being able to treat his problem with conventional means, and every one of them turning down his plea of desparation for something stronger than Darvocet so that he can have just one more happy moment without pain.

There is the typical bell curve that describes our populations need for use of drugs. There's those who never need it, those who need what's conventional, and a little tiny percentile of people who are living in hell in spite of having gone through every possible conventional treatment only to have minimally detectable relief. It is important for these people that they be afforded every possible solution to their woes. It is necessary that these people be allowed to decide for themselves whether they will assume the risks that our prohibited substances pose. For someone writhing in pain that has not abated for more than fleeting moments for years and years, who is big daddy pants to say that morphine isn't worth the risk. Many people feel so bad that they wish they would just die, but are too devoted to their family to put them through the trama. Who is daddy to say that these people, who by their account are better off dead than the way they currently are, cannot decide to assume the risks of this drug or that for the possibility of finding relief, at the possibility of switching from "I wish I could just die, but I can't kill myself" to "Ah, at last, I can see the world clearly again without the blinding veil of my body's suffering." Who is anyone to take that chance away from someone.

Of coarse, that is an extreme illustration, but any theory worth it's weight in gold must be able to admit of extremes. And seriously, get over yourselves, just because you wouldn't personally take a risk, or let your young child take a risk, doesn't mean that someone else can't say, after a fully rational inquiry into the subject, that the risk is worth it for them.

We humans sprang into existence without being consulted first on whether or not we wanted to, and it's sickening to think that now that we are here, we can't use all of the world's offerings to make our lives better, or at least less painful. If someone would rather spend their precious time in this one chance of existence they will ever get doing something other than spending an hour at the gym every day, and depriving themselves of the food they love, who are we to say they can't assume the risk of using a pill with risks. Even if it is the "easy way" or "cheating," who says that's wrong.