Ephedrine

A nutritional supplement company in Laguna Hills announced Friday it will temporarily halt distribution of a product that contains small amounts of ephedrine. Alluding to the NFL's recent ban on players endorsing the stimulant, Formulated Sciences Inc. said it would pull its relatively new product, Duzoxin, off its line. Formulated Sciences President Paul Edalat said the move is being made to allay any safety concerns in the product.

Ato Boldon, an Olympic silver medalist, tested positive for the banned stimulant ephedrine. Testing positive for ephedrine carries a maximum penalty of disqualification from the meet and a public warning. The International Amateur Athletic Federation said Saturday that Boldon, of Trinidad and Tobago, failed the drug test at the Mt. San Antonio College Relays in Walnut in April.

Police and city officials plan to limit sales of cold medicines and other over-the-counter drugs that contain ephedrine, which is commonly extracted to make methamphetamine. The City Council tonight will consider an ordinance that reduces the number of ephedrine-related products customers can buy from local markets and pharmacies. Retailers would be prohibited from selling more than three packages of the cold drugs--or 100 tablets--to a customer at a time.

The NFL will begin testing players July 1 for the banned stimulant ephedrine, a substance used in many dietary supplements and found to cause heart attacks and strokes. Implementation of the testing program was ordered after an agreement was reached with the NFL Players Assn., which approved the league's ban on ephedrine last September but sought further consultation with Commissioner Paul Tagliabue on testing procedures.

The three young entrepreneurs met their contacts outside a Wal-Mart here and drove off with them, apparently convinced that they would be celebrating a lucrative new deal. But authorities believe it was a set-up, linked to Mexican mobsters bent on reshaping the global drug trafficking map. The three men were handcuffed, forced to kneel in the mud and sprayed with bullets; their bodies were dumped in a ditch.

Track stars Carl Lewis and Joe DeLoach, who won gold medals at the Seoul Olympics, tested positive before those 1988 Summer Games for trace amounts of stimulants commonly found in cold medicines, but under the rules in place then and now deserve to be cleared of any suggestion they used performance-enhancing substances, according to documents obtained by The Times.

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation to determine whether San Diego-based Metabolife International lied when it told the Food and Drug Administration that it had received no reports of adverse health effects caused by its bestselling weight-loss product, officials said Thursday.

An over-the-counter dietary supplement containing the stimulant ephedrine was probably a contributing factor in the death of Baltimore Oriole pitching prospect Steve Bechler, a coroner said Tuesday. Bechler had been taking three capsules each morning of Xenadrine RFA-1, a weight-loss drug that contains ephedrine, which has been linked to heatstroke and heart trouble, Broward County (Fla.) medical examiner Joshua Perper said.

Public health officials in Texas, citing "advice" from the Bush administration, have suspended enforcement of a new state regulation designed to protect athletes and other users of dietary supplements. The Texas regulation centers on supplements that contain ephedrine, a powerful stimulant that is suspected of causing at least 80 deaths nationally. The new rule requires the labels on those products to provide a toll-free number for reporting suspected side effects to the U.S.

Damage control started not long after tennis players and officials got up to prepare for another day at the Australian Open and read the 108-point, front-page headline today in the Herald Sun: TENNIS DRUG MYSTERY Pictured on the front page were Svetlana Kuznetsova of Russia, Elena Dementieva of Russia and Nathalie Dechy of France. The accompanying story said there was a "drug cloud" hanging over the three players. Jarring, yes.