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The Oregon Department of Justice reached a deal with national retailer, The Vitamin Shoppe, to ban supplements containing an amphetamine-like substance from its shelves.
(Picasa 2.7/Wikimedia Commons/Sage Ross)
National retailer The Vitamin Shoppe has promised the Oregon Department of Justice it will no longer sell a variety of popular weight-loss and energy supplements that have been found to contain an amphetamine-like stimulant.
The retailer, based in North Bergen, N.J., had already announced in a press release on April 8 that it would no longer carry the products with the ingredient BMPEA. The company has six Oregon outlets.
The next day, Justice Department investigators visited the chain's Salem store. The retailer had already pulled products from the shelves, but they remained in a back room, according to Kristina Edmunson, Justice Department spokeswoman.
"We returned later that day and instructed the manager to preserve the various products for our investigative purposes," said Edmunson, adding that the state contacted the company's attorneys the next day. "This agreement helps ensure that the products stay off the shelf and any future products will be fully tested."
The Vitamin Shoppe doesn't admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement filed in Marion County Circuit Court Thursday. Yet if Vitamin Shoppe breaks from the agreement, the retailer could face $25,000 fines for each violation.
The company operates seven stores in Oregon, including four in the Portland area. The retailer's subsidiary, Super Supplements, which has 10 stores statewide, also is covered in the agreement.
"The products that Vitamin Shoppe took off its shelves could pose very serious risks to consumers," Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said in a press release Thursday.
"These are nutritional supplements that have not been properly tested--and we don't know what the long term consequences are of these products," her statement said. "I expect other retailers to follow Vitamin Shoppe's lead and remove all products containing, or at risk of containing, BMPEA from their stores."
Late last year, health officials in Canada banned the products in stores there after calling the amphetamine-like ingredient "a serious health risk."
The Canadian government's alert said that "amphetamine stimulants can increase blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature; lead to serious cardiovascular complications (including stroke) at high doses; suppress sleep and appetite, and be addictive."
BMPEA was created in the 1930s as an alternative to amphetamine. However, the substance was never introduced as a pharmaceutical drug and therefore, side effects were not studied in humans.
The New York Times reported in early April that the Food and Drug Administration had two years ago studied 21 supplements that listed the plant-based product acacia rigidula on their labels. The agency found nine tested positive for varying amounts of BMPEA.
But the agency didn't publicize the product or manufacturer names or recall the products, the newspaper reported. On April 23, the FDA issued a warning letter to companies using the product which the agency said isn't approved as a "dietary ingredient."
Dr. Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, launched his own study on the supplements and announced last month that he'd found BMPEA in 11 of 21 products tested.
Edmunson said the information from Cohen's study motivated the Justice Department to launch its investigation.
Cohen's study found BMPEA in the following products once sold at The Vitamin Shoppe: JetFuel Superburn, JetFuel T-300 and MX-LS7, Aro Black Series Burn, Black Widow, Dexaprine XR, Fastin-XR, Lipodrene Hardcore, Lipodrene Xtreme, Stimerex-ES and Yellow Scorpion.
-- Laura Gunderson
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