DS on DMAA: A Dispatch From the Geranium Fields

A Watershed Moment in Over the Counter Supplements

Welcome to our first matter-of-business post on the new blog. We’ve tabled some of the other content we were planning for this week because DMAA, even though an important topic in this industry under any circumstances, now has great timely relevance with the summary judgment against Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals this week. We, of course, won’t have been the first to cover the topic. And just as is the case with our formulations, where we’re extremely reluctant to be the second or third or any number in the rank of followers that bandwagons onto an idea, we are making this post because we feel we have a unique perspective to voice on the ingredient. This isn’t going to be a legal analysis or a long-sighted prediction of the future of sports supplements – but we’d like to tell you how the ruling affects OUR future and our customers’.

Along Came A Craze

Any misgivings we might have had with the questionable provenance of DMAA wasn’t our only reason for avoiding the ingredient in our formulations. Rather, it wasn’t something we introduced to the market. And as we touched upon above, DS is quite finnicky when it comes to vetting suitors for our formulations. You might recall that the very first DMAA product reached the public around 2005, with more popular followers picking up market share in 2006. Driven Sports would remain without a pre-workout product for more than half a decade after that, well after the market trend and insatiable appetite for these high powered pre-workouts had been established. Now, we’re not going to tell you some story about how Craze was a product we developed with the purpose of unseating or challenging DMAA. It was actually a serendipitous discovery of one plant that sprouted wings after countless rounds of experimentation yielded a rapid progression of stimulant synergy. But that’s another story for another time, or another blog post. Once we had our blue ribbon winning formula, though, we saw enough distinctions between the feel and experience of Craze to position it as a challenger to King DMAA with plenty of merits.

Not everybody went for it. There’s been an ever-steady trend towards achieving what many refer to informally as “that cracked out feeling.” Stim doses crept higher and higher and caffeine doses started pushing to the half-gram barrier, but what really drove the point home perhaps more than any other trend was some of the whopping doses of yohimbine, often in conjunction with a hardcore stimulant base. Sure, with enough yohimbine you can practically reanimate a corpse, but it’s a dirty feeling, and one that the vast majority of the category’s connoisseurs try their best to avoid. We, for one, have only experimented with a bare minimum amount of it necessary to create synergy. On the other hand, the smooth surfaced tunnel vision of Craze transported you into that same mental dimension as DMAA without throwing your body into fight-or-flight mode.

We could have thrown DMAA in the original Craze. If we had wanted to, we’re confident we could have refined the 1,3/caffeine combo to push it to its maximum potential. We also could have thrown it into a replacement product when Craze went off the market… but we didn’t. One thing that’s not disputed in this whole brouhaha is that whether or not DMAA can be found in a plant, even if it were it would have been in exceedingly small doses. All industry formulators were using a synthetic variant of the chemical in their manufacturing process because any theoretical natural extraction to satisfy a hundred million dollar market would have been astronomically time consuming and expensive. Contrast this to the difficulties presented to us by Craze: we oversaw the entire life cycle of the dendrobium plants contained in our formula, from seeding to harvest and then the costly standardization that made it possible for all these collected stems to exhibit their potency in a friendly scooper-sized dose. We’re intimately aware of the wholesale pricing of sports supplement ingredients. The cost of all of these synthetics in bulk was trivial compared to the costs that went into the making of Craze. If we were a publicly traded company, our board would have been livid at a comparison of our profit margins to companies that imported kilos of DMAA powder.

If This is the New State of Affairs…

However, to reiterate, we’re not here to argue about whether DMAA is naturally occurring or lawful. Given the history and practices of the FDA and the DEA, the latter of those two concerns seems to be somewhat arbitrary. Regardless of where you stand on the former, we are sympathetic to claims that the government engineered its analysis and testing of DMAA prejudicially to influence findings supportive of the its accusations. The decision could have gone one of two ways, and we feel that we had something to gain in either possible world. A ruling favorable to the legal disposition of DMAA would have had vindicating ramifications for the original Craze and dendrobium. But unless that comes to pass through appeal, there’s no point in bringing it up as an academic thought experiment. Nor are we going to take this as an opportunity to grandstand in any way about any alleged problems with DMAA, even though plenty of the same companies who are now facing the reality of adapting to their star player having been declared an adulterated food eligible to seizure are some of the same people who aggressively hunted Craze, calling for its worldwide ban and the imprisonment of its creators. The people who fit this bill greatly outnumber us, but this is one scenario in which we as standalone players are observing the failure of the old adage about safety in numbers.

Where exactly are we going with this? Where others might see a giant gaping void to fill in their pre-workout and fat burner categories, we have backup plans. Perhaps that’s not even the best phrase, because for years now in the domestic U.S. market we have steered clear of this ingredient and members of its highly popular, chemically related family. Perhaps if we were feeling particularly diabolical, we could have hastened this whole process by a few years and ruined it for everybody simply by doing what everybody else was doing; with the staggering amount of alarmist media firepower we absorbed from USA Today, we wouldn’t at all be surprised if this would have marked the end of the party. But no, we’ve been biding our time and doing our own thing – which essentially comes down to behaving as if DMAA had never existed.

Staying on the compliant side of the fence and taking a pass on promising ingredients that violate DSHEA or require an NDI request that will likely never be granted has made our development process frustrating and challenging. We won’t begrudge people the opportunity to use the obvious resources at their disposal, but we know that relying on this blockbuster chemical has made much of the industry lazy and complacent. The conundrum facing our R&D process is that while Driven Sports very much thinks of itself as a company whose core following comes from the “supplement underground” and “hardcore bodybuilding” scenes, we’re bound by a professional code to formulate with ingredients that are lawful. You’ll note, for example, that you’ve never seen any of the synthetic racetams or questionable steroidal derivatives that work their way in and out of the product lines of our competitors. This is a consciously formulated internal policy to which we adhered prior to the introduction of Craze v1, and if anything, it’s only become more binding since that product left the market. For better or for worse, we know that the eyes of the industry and its watchdogs now follow us more closely than anybody else. Even if regulatory compliance weren’t part of our mantra, our survival would necessitate it.

Super Stim Is Sticking Around

A few years ago we released the one-a-day fat burner SuperStim, a product of which we were very proud for its achievement in (actually) breaking through the 8 hour energy barrier, resulting in stimulant longevity that could not even be matched by the strongest DMAA-based fat burners on the market. If those products are no longer there, that positions us with a product that consistently delivers 8-10+ hours of energy with VERY strong appetite reduction. Compare that to your average uninspired caffeine-based diet pill that might pack anywhere from 2.5 – 4 hours of weak energy at best, with minimal anorectic or thermogenic properties. SuperStim was originally released when the first warning signs about the demise of DMAA were starting to spread, and retailers and even major distributors were beginning to discontinue these products out of fear of litigation. But then as we all know, Hi Tech made a gutsy stand in court on behalf of the entire industry – most of whom resumed selling or continued to sell these same products and profit from them with little to no acknowledgement of the party running legal interference and assuming the greatest risks on their behalf. And so until this week, it was “business as usual” again. Unless there’s a successful appeal, though, that protective cover is now blown and there will be a major shakeup.

SuperStim is what we currently have to offer the public, but there is more coming. As much as we are not the sort of outfit that likes to tease products or create mystery or fanfare about something that our customers aren’t able to purchase readily, this is an unusual set of circumstances that prompts us to let the industry and our followers know that we do have things in the pipeline for stimulant based fat burner/pre workout products, and they will absolutely fill those gaps on supplement store shelves that are about to appear. Some of these candidate formulas would have been considered release-worthy long ago by other companies, but our compulsion to refine our blends through countless test iterations and our rigorous commitment to dotting all the i’s prior to inevitable heavy public scrutiny after release are what have been eating up our time.

Driven Is Ready to Take the Wheel

As time passes, we’ve also been more convinced that the one-size-fits-all approach to formulating products in this industry is illogical and ends up both stifling innovation and robbing customers of their ability to exercise personal preference. What might be considered the ideal pre-workout candidate will be completely different for somebody who works out early in the morning before heading to the office vs. somebody getting off their shift and training at the gym right before bed. Similarly, one person might be inclined to take a fat burner once a day, while another might prefer dosing multiple times. Stimulants vary wildly in their potency and duration, and when natural formulations are at play, we don’t have much option but to play with the cards that we’ve been dealt by Mother Nature. We’re toying around with several batches of ingredients, all of which have qualitatively unique properties, and span the gamut in terms of length of activity. And as much as we possibly can as a small company with increased manufacturing overhead, we want to give you the benefit of being able to purchase a product that is tailored to your needs. We hope it won’t be too long before the first batch of those makes a run.

For those of you who heard us out, we thank you for your attention.

If you just pulled a TLDR; and scrolled down to the bottom, this one is for you: Don’t worry, DMAA fans: we got you covered.