The shadowy world of sports supplements

March 16, 2017

Robert Tauler, managing partner at Tauler Smith, a Los Angeles attorney who protects the nutritional supplement market from people who openly sell illegal steroids and amphetamines as sports supplements joins eHealth Radio and the Health News, Legal & Supplement Channels.

Listen to interview with host Eric Michaels & guest Robert Tauler discuss the following:

Tell us a bit about problem of illegal steroids being sold right out in the open online and in sports nutrition stores. How big is the problem and what’s at stake?
How do these companies work and why can they operate so openly? Where’s the FDA in policing this problem?
What are the most common kinds of illegal supplements being sold right now, how do they work, and what are the risks and known side-effects? Do you know of any cases of someone suffering serious physical injury from illegal supplements that you can share with us?
How do you use the law to go after these bad actors? How effective have you been in getting the courts to force these people to take these poisons off the market?
Who is the market these people sell to? Can you tell us something about the buyers and the sellers? Who makes these supplements? Do the makers of these supplements have any medical backgrounds or qualifications that lets them experiment on customers with unapproved pharmaceutical research drugs?
How can unsuspecting people protect themselves from these substances? What should they know? How should they read a supplement’s label?

Los Angeles trial attorney Robert Tauler devotes the majority of his practice to nutritional supplement litigation, specifically eliminating steroid and amphetamine analogs from over-the-counter sports supplements. These drugs are sold openly in stores and online under all sorts of names with no warnings about side effects, whether the chemicals have been banned for human consumption, or whether they are outright illegal — as all steroids are without a doctor’s prescription.

In 2016, he was awarded "Attorney of the Year" by the Los Angeles Westside Bar Association. In 2015 he obtained a $10 million jury verdict against a supplement manufacturer, which was among the top 25 highest verdicts in California that year.

Tauler, a native Californian, is a 2005 graduate from Harvard Law School. He was honored as an NCAA Big West Scholar-Athlete while an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, where he majored in political science and played on the Anteater’s nationally-ranked men’s volleyball team.