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On Friday November 9th 2007, I spoke with Ralph Meibos, the president of San Rafael Chemical Services in Salt Lake City Utah. San Rafael has been doing lab analysis for the supplement industry for 17 years. Basically, the supplement industry uses them for quality control to make sure that their products meet label claim. Until last week, they had a DEA license. A company or an individual could send them a sample of a drug to test to make sure it contained what it was supposed to contain.
So, you could send them your multi-vitamin to see if there was as much Vitamin C in the bottle as the lable claims. You could send them one of your generic heart pills to make sure it was the same as the brand pill. And you could even send them an anabolic steroid sample and they would tell you if it was what you thought it was.
Well, the DEA did not like this and had a problem with San Rafael performing quality control for steroid manufacturers and underground labs. And so they were raided. As a result, they had to surrender their DEA license, so they can no longer work with controlled substances.
The President, Mr. Meibos, is understandably devastated. As he explained to me, the raid was not a financial blow to his business, because the majority of what he tests are dietary supplements, but, the taking of his customer lists, financial records and essentially lots of the documentation he uses to run his business has be a severe emotional blow.
I asked him why he thought he was raided and he offered up several theories:
One is the "low hanging fruit" theory. According to Mr. Meibos, the DEA has been so ineffective at busting narcotics dealers, that they are going after the steroid dealer and he was swept up in that. He even suggested that he believed that the DEA could have thought that he was running a BALCO style lab instead of a chemical testing facility.
He also speculated that the Raid could have been provoked by an unscrupulous underground lab itself. For example, some of the steroids he tested were what they were supposed to be. Others of the steroids he tested were not what they were supposed to be and some samples even contained completely unrelated and dangerous substances. His lab was shining a light on the really bad underground labs passing off one substance as a specific anabolic steroid when it was not. Mr. Meibos speculates that a lab getting a bad quality grade could have vindictively tipped off the DEA.
In my opinion, San Rafael Chemical Services is an innocent victim that got swept up on Operation Raw Deal - the largest steroid enforcement action in U.S. history.
Here is the statement that San Rafael issued.
To whom it may concern,
We apologize for having to inform any who care to know of this particular occurrence however, because we strive to operate with honesty, integrity and without discrimination, we have encountered scenarios in which we have not made friends.
Some one or some organization has informed the DEA that SRCS was performing illegal anabolic steroid analysis. We have always maintained and kept current our DEA license for controlled substances and were under the apparent misapprehension that the analyses we have been performing were totally legitimate, well within the scope of the law and a service to the supplement industry.
Whether or not the warrant that was served on SRCS was granted under false pretenses, we were raided on October 25th, 2007 by agents from several agencies including DEA, State Commerce Commission, and local law enforcement who over the course of the day cloned our computer hard drives, confiscated most all of our retained samples as well as our analytical and financial records for the previous five or more years. Any and all documentation and records we had pertaining to samples received, email and personal financial information, client lists and standards lists were confiscated and will be reviewed extensively by whomever the DEA deems worthy.
We voluntarily surrendered our controlled substances license and will no longer be capable of providing analysis for the aforementioned substances. Because of the total confiscation of all our documentation, the production of timely requests of analyses in progress will be affected negatively. We will do all we can to get back up to speed and minimize to the best of our ability any interruptions in service for "non-regulated" substances as soon as we can. We apologize deeply for any inconvenience and negative impact this will have.
Sincerely,
San Rafael Chemical Services, Inc.
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