Please pardon the long post, but this is a somewhat complicated topic and I want to be as detailed as possible.

I am posting this in the hopes that some of you law-savy Nexians might be kind enough to share some of your expert knowledge about current regulations in regards to a harm-reduction service we are hoping to make available in the near future.

Also: Please feel free to share any opinions and thoughts on the matter even if your background isn't law. .

Background on the initiative:

In most consumer industries there exist third-part consumer protection organizations that independently evaluate the safety of the products being sold by producers of these products. Due to the somewhat grey-market way many ethnobotanical suppliers and research chemicals vendors operate, there is very little oversight as to how honestly they supply the products they do.

In general, I am of course grateful that such `loopholes' exist and applaud these vendors who are taking a huge risk for us by providing us with un-scheduled alternatives to medicines that have been lost in the witch-hunt they call the `the war on drugs'.

While most of these vendors operate out of a genuine desire to do good, there have of course also been many reports where vendors of legal sacred medicines and novel research chemicals have, either by accident or for more nefarious reasons, sold products that were not what they were advertised to be or contained some toxic adulterants. Unfortunately, some groups also pose as legitimate vendors but are simply scammers who hope to make a quick buck but have no intention of fulfilling their customer's order.

For this reason, some of the members of the harm-reduction community that I work with, are looking into starting a consumer protection program for ethnobotanical and RC-vendors in the hope of providing some aid for people trying to navigate the jungle of what's out there and empower them to make some informed decisions about how trustworthy a vendor is and what can assess the potential risks for themselves.

In practice, this would mean conduction test-purchases and analyzing the samples using FTIR spectroscopy and GC-MS to determine the the quality of the vendor's products. The results of the analyses would then be posted on a third-party website (not here!!) and ratings would be assigned to vendors based on the analytical findings. Basically this would create a roster, where folks can see who is legit and who might better be avoided. We hope that this will help with reducing tragic accidents and create at least some degree of accountability to their customers for vendors in this area, as well as creating a legitimate reason to oppose further legal restrictions for an industry that helps many, but harms few.

:Legal hurdles

While ordering samples for analysis should not pose many legal problems, since the substances in question are, by definition, unscheduled.

The problem is likely with the vendors themselves. While the more honest ones may support such an initiative, others may feel threatened by it since it could expose dishonest business practices that they might be following. Also, in order to avoid conflict of interest, the test purchases would probably have to be done officially giving an official reason for the purchase other than than quality control. I.e. the test-purchaser would have to cite a reason for their purchase that isn't really true, because informing the vendors of their true intent would likely result in them sending samples of higher quality than those that they send to their `ordinary' customers, thereby construing our quality checks, which could of course be very dangerous for customers for obvious reasons.

So the main question We're trying to get an answer to is: Are there any legal reasons why it would be against the law to perform quality control analyses of samples, make them publicly available, and assign a "trustworthiness" rating to vendors based on the analytical data? Is the minor degree of deception, necessary for conducting test purchases, defaceable? . After all, this is standard practice in most industries and we would essentially be doing the same thing, just for a different `industry'.

If you have experience in consumer protection organizations and what laws govern them, I would be very grateful for any advice about this. Of course, we would be discrete in all steps, and never officially imply that these businesses sell their products for human consumption (since this could be cause for litigation), since they are all adamant that this is not the case (Not that it fools anybody... ).

Everyone on our team shares the opinion that most of these vendors provide a brave and much-needed service. So to sum up, the aim of this project is to confirm the legitimacy of honest vendors, and to warn against the possible dangers of more cynical vendors.

I again apologize for this long post, but we want to make sure we do everything in a sustainable way.

Peace

Albert