It came to a close a long time ago. Amazon refuses to sell many legal products, eg caffeine powder and anything with the confederate flag.

Just in case anyone is interested in caffeine powder (interesting because it sublimates) do yourself a favor and don't order it.

The smallest orders available online are enough to kill an elephant, and you need a $500+ scale to dose it accurately enough to keep a human from overdosing. And while most human overdoses will be uniquely unpleasant but not lethal, there is definitely the potential for a lethal dose if someone puts a tablespoonful into a drink or something.

Pure caffeine is a uniquely bad thing to have around your living quarters. It's basically a poison (because of the difficulty in measuring dosage and small range between useful and dangerous effect), but people feel very comfortable with it, imagine it's safe to eat, and a big enough chunk of people will act macho towards it.

Funny story, I use to work for a pharma company, and we had all that kind of stuff in a secure drug lock up area. You had to log stuff out, it was all very organized. We did a lot of contract manufacturing and we'd get large orders and bring in temp workers. We had a guy one day who ended up getting into the pure caffeine powder, the chemist in the lab figured he'd ingested 800 cola's worth of caffeine. Like you said, not going to kill you but we sent him to the hospital any ways. And we decided to only allow regular employees to get into that area :)

800 colas of caffeine is easily enough to kill you. 34mg caffeine/12oz Coca Cola * 800 cans = 27g. LD50 in humans is 150-200mg/kg, so 12-16g for a 80kg adult.

You seem like you are knowledgeable about these things... how do they measure the LD50 in humans?

We kill mice, rats, hamsters, rabbits, and dogs with caffeine, and extrapolate the LD50 from our test data. Animal testing can be really awful.

The alternative is not knowing the LD50 of caffeine for humans.

Doesn't seem that crazy to me. One site I looked at sells 300 capsules for $15 and the whole page is littered with clear warnings about overdose. The lethal dose of caffeine seems to be around 5 to 10 grams so you'd have to eat 25 200mg capsules in a short period to get into danger. That doesn't seem any more dangerous than something like tylenol which they do sell.

The danger is with powders, not pills. Dosing powders requires you have a scale that is more accurate than what most people have, and proper technique in weighing it. The best way for most people to get an accurate dosage is to compound the caffeine with some filler and weigh that (cut it, basically).

Honestly, the only reason you should be dealing with powders is if you're making your own 'stack' of nootropics.

I think the grandparents warning only applies to pure caffein powder. Essentially pills are (professionally) predosed to be safe, so it shouldn't be a problem.

It's not that hard to dose out. Mix 10 grams of caffeine into 1L of water to obtain a 1% solution. Mix 100 grams of your primary solution into 1L of water to obtain a 0.1% secondary solution.

Every gram of secondary solution now has a milligram of caffeine. 2 tablespoons of secondary solution is roughly equivalent to a cola.

You're not even remotely correct. A $20 one will work just fine. Caffeine is dosed in the 100+ mg range to 300 mg for the average person.

> you need a $500+ scale to dose it accurately enough to keep a human from overdosing.

No you don't. It's not hard at all using milligram scales < $50. I do it all the time with various substances... including caffeine.

Yet they readily sell 5g bags of Yohimbine HCl powder which can cause cardiac problems at 30-50mg.

I agree that caffeine powder isn't worth buying because it tends to come in large sizes and is hard to measure out. I'd recommend caffeine pills/tablets, though. Much easier than brewing some coffee or tea, and you can manage dosages more easily.

The best way to use bulk caffeine is to dissolve it in water. It's highly soluble and you can easily measure larger volumes of water.

> you need a $500+ scale to dose it accurately enough

Or you can just get a super small 0.25 cent plastic scoop that amounts to normal dose.

You definitely can't do this, because you don't actually know the density of what you're measuring. Depending on how the caffeine was prepared, it'll be in crystalline flakes or chunks of varying sizes and configurations. Think of it like snow. You can't tell how much water went into a given volume of snow because you don't know if you're dealing with fluffy snow, wet snow, super fine powder snow, etc.

You definitely can. You don't need exactly 200.000 mg of caffeine for it to be 1 serving. Using 2 ~100mg spoonfuls will probably get you 150-250mg of caffeine, which isn't any more or less accurate than brewed coffee, which varies wildly in caffeine content.

Interesting how they are not responding to comments like this demonstrating how wrong they are.

There is a difference between refusing to sell things you think are unethical even if you disagree with the reasoning vs. refusing to sell things for baldly anti-competitive reasons

It isn't about ethics, it is about appealing to the masses under a very shallow guise of ethics. That might not change your point much, but for me personally, it leaves a more bitter taste in my mouth.

There is a difference, but it's definitely one that can be intentionally conflated if it suits them.

They still sell the current American flag, and we've killed what, over 100K civilians in the middle east in an unnecessary war? I guess fake outrage is necessary to fill the 24 hour news cycle.

Legality should not be the bar you hold products to. For example, you don't want to sell products which don't work. You don't want to sell mislabelled products.

That era is over since 2010 at least.

http://teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-removes-incest-related-ero...

Color me cynical, but I don't have the slightest faith in a corporation's fairness and integrity.

Hmm, guess it is also time for a new neutral vendor to rise up? Anyone interested in funding an startup that will provide warehousing and an online marketplace for physical goods in a neutral manor to ultimately benefit consumers and shareholders? We also promise to try to make the search better than amazons. email is in my profile.

A huge part of Amazon's success is that they don't do all of the warehousing. It's quite easy to become a seller on Amazon and ship stuff from your home. That's how they can have such a massive selection of items for sale. Obviously they also have huge warehouses. Good luck competing with them though :)

Which is really what the discussion is about, besides ebay who else competes in this space?