E-Mail This Article to a Friend Buzz kill What the government isn’t telling you about the recent ephedra ban BY CAMILLE DODERO

I do [ephedrine] a lot. And I’m not alone. I see you out there.... I see you in the health-food stores. You’re perusing the colorful bottles of dietary supplements and weight-loss aids and workout fuels with their long lists of wholesome-sounding ingredients designed to camouflage the high doses of ephedrine they contain so that [Denver] Cherry Creek socialites who vote Republican can better lie to themselves. "Oh, no, I’m not doing drugs. I’m taking a dietary supplement." Yeah, yeah, Jenny Crank. Why don’t you send your nanny out for another bottle of maximum-strength Oxycut?

"Confessions of an Ephedrine Eater," David Holthouse, Westword

TOMMY THOMPSON came to help the fat people. It was two days before the dawning of 2004 when the stodgy secretary of health and human services informed the pack of reporters before him that his agency had scheduled this news conference today, at the tail end of the nutritional nightmare known as the holiday season, for the benefit of those who’d recently "put on some extra weight." Americans who’d spent the past few weeks devouring plates of sugar cookies and quaffing countless mugs of eggnog would now be trying to undo the damage. And the former Wisconsin governor didn’t want them raiding supermarket shelves for dietary supplements that pledged to melt their cellulite — particularly if those over-the-counter nostrums contained the herb ephedra, also listed on product labels under its Chinese herbal name, ma huang. "I want people to eat properly and to exercise and to get their weight under control," Thompson said. "But I do not want them to be turning to ephedra products like this in order to think that they will be able to lose weight."

Thompson, it turns out, had more than the well-being of the corpulent in mind. Post-holiday spread may have elicited an unctuous teardrop from the secretary, but it also settled over the nation’s butt at a perfect moment for advancing another objective: ending the use of performance-enhancing drugs among athletes, as announced by President Bush just weeks later in his State of the Union address. Critics had been calling for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to pull the dietary supplement off shelves for years, so the secretary had to explain why he was here, now, today to announce that ephedra would soon be outlawed, effective as early as March.

Notice how Thompson moved almost imperceptibly from warding off excess flab to chastising athletes for cheating and corrupting the morals of youth. "We had over 16,000 adverse-incident reports that we explored, as well as other scientific evidence," Thompson asserted. Of those thousands of reports, the severest side effects were deaths, heart attacks, strokes, seizures, and psychiatric disorders; ephedrine constricts blood vessels and increases blood pressure, which can cause major problems for people with pre-existing health problems or heart conditions. Hence, Thompson claimed that ephedra-based dietary supplements "were simply too risky to be used, whether by people who want to lose weight or by elite athletes seeking to enhance their performance or by youngsters who want to be like these athletes." As anyone who heard about the highly publicized training-camp death of Baltimore Oriole Steve Bechler last spring knows, the plant extract isn’t found only in weight-loss aids such as Metabolife, Diet Fuel, and Metabolift. Ephedra — and more specifically its active ingredient, ephedrine — also packs the punch in performance enhancers like Stacker 2, Hydroxycut, and Ripped Fuel.

In reality, though, ephedrine hasn’t been the pick-me-up of choice merely among zaftig housewives, cutthroat playing-field competitors, and adolescents emulating their athletic heroes like foolish kids recreating Jackass stunts. Since ephedrine is actually a low-grade amphetamine that stimulates the central nervous system, speeds up the heart, and erases the immediate need for sleep, plenty of people have treated it like legal speed. Beyond that, the herb’s original use was to assuage breathing problems, not to further weight loss, and ephedrine is still available in some states as a legal over-the-counter treatment for asthma.

But Thompson didn’t mention any of the medical or moral complexities surrounding ephedra in his press conference. Nor did he mention how neatly the ephedra-ban edict fit into the Bush administration’s aggressive anti-drug policies. No, unless you were already wise to his intent, Thompson seemed to be here simply to protect the health of fat people.

I think many, many people have been taking it — more than the average person is aware of," says Dr. Amanda Gruber, an associate chief substance-abuse researcher at McLean Hospital who studied ephedrine use among female bodybuilders for a paper published in 1998. "Most of [the bodybuilders] didn’t tell anyone they were taking it," Gruber adds. Why not? It seemed like cheating. "You want to do it yourself. And people using it as a diet aid don’t want to admit that they’re taking a pill or a drink to get thinner."

"I take it for some energy, mostly just for weight control," says Matthew Poskus, a North Reading resident who’s taken less than 25 milligrams of ephedrine each day for five or six years. "I’ve had no problems, personally. The people I know who’ve taken it did not have problems if they weren’t abusing it."

For Tom Venuto, one 25-milligram dose of ephedrine packed the power of 10 coffees. Author of the muscle-growth manual Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle and a competitive bodybuilder for more than 20 years, Venuto openly describes himself a "former ephedrine junkie." The New Jersey–based personal trainer first started eating ephedrine-loaded supplements before workouts back in the early ’90s, and admits to taking 25-milligram pills of Dymetadrine 25 "like they were candy."

Venuto has since quit "cold turkey," but still sees widespread ephedrine use in the muscle-building community. "They’re hooked on it," he says of his fellow bodybuilders. "I’ve worked in health clubs for 15 years, and the people will come in and talk about their Speed Stack and joke about being hooked on it. ‘I have to have this before the workout.’ "

Does Venuto consider ephedra addictive? "It is addictive," he says. "Absolutely. Especially if you go off it and you see it affecting your [workout] results. Or if you’re physically dragging and you don’t feel the same. Makes it really easy to go back."

Ephedrine isn’t just a fat burner or a performance enhancer — it’s a pep pill. (See "Speed Demons," News & Features, March 9, 2001.) It’s allowed beer-swilling college kids to gulp 10 pints at the bar and remain relatively coherent; graduate students to tear through stressful all-nighters; truckers to navigate sleepless cross-country trips; pot smokers to counteract marijuana-induced drowsiness. It’s the reason Red Sox first baseman Kevin Millar was able to drive 17 hours to the team’s Florida training camp last March, when his new club called him up at the last minute.

That’s because, while it’s banned in the NFL, the NCAA, and the Olympic Games, ephedrine use is permitted in Major League Baseball. (The MLB outlawed ephedra at the minor-league level after Bechler’s death and is currently in talks with the players’ association about prohibiting it in the major leagues.) Many players, including Mo Vaughn and David Wells, have openly admitted that it’s prevalent in clubhouses, as much a part of the fabric of baseball as chewing tobacco. Nomar Garciaparra even cautioned against a crazed, finger-pointing crackdown; the Boston Globe quoted the beloved Boston shortstop as saying that players using dietary supplements could unfairly be labeled as "druggies."

So is ephedrine a drug? "Clearly, what you have here are drugs being sold as dietary supplements," says Jacob Sullum, author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (J.P. Tarcher, 2003), who’s written sundry columns railing against the ban in the libertarian-leaning Reason magazine. "But people don’t really want to admit that’s what they’re doing."