Being the personable Southerner that he is, Gurley, a pharmaceutical scientist and analytical chemist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, called the manufacturer to ask what was what. A spokesman for the Kutting Edge, in Corinth, Miss., readily confirmed Gurley's findings. "They said, 'We know there's nothing in it,'" Gurley says. "They said their supplier had gotten mad and didn't put any ephedra in the pills."

In the weird, sometimes dangerous, world of dietary supplements, there are few controls over what's in a product, and little to tell consumers how much they should take. Half of all Americans report dosing themselves with herbs, vitamins and other supplements. Weight loss aids like Metabolife 356, Diet Phen, Metabomax, Trim Fast and Exandra Lean (where do they get these names?) and other ephedra products make up one of the top-selling categories in the $14 billion-a-year supplement industry.

As it happens, Gurley's $40 bottle of nothing may be a safer bet than an ephedra product that actually contains active ingredients, because for some people the herb can be dangerous, even deadly. Since 1994, the Food and Drug Administration has received reports of more than 40 deaths associated with ephedra supplements, and approximately 900 bad reactions ranging from dizziness and nausea to psychosis, seizures, heart attacks and strokes.

Why is it so easy to walk into a health-food store and buy a potent, potentially harmful weight-loss product -- or any dietary supplement, for that matter? Credit a spineless FDA and a politically savvy, increasingly powerful supplement industry. It successfully lobbied Congress to pass a law six years ago that made it easier to get these products on the market, and more difficult for the FDA to remove them if they proved harmful.

"Dietary supplements don't meet the level of standards that my hair dryer has to meet," says Thomas J. Moore, a health policy analyst at George Washington University, in Washington. "Everywhere [else] you go, everything you touch, from pumping gas to turning on your hair dryer, there is a web of consumer safety."

The makers of ephedra supplements have been especially adept at fighting off federal and state attempts to rein in their products. When the FDA holds yet another round of public hearings on ephedra this summer, the manufacturers will undoubtedly launch another blitz of public relations and lobbying. Just last month, the Ephedra Education Council tried to block publication of Gurley's paper in the American Journal of Health System Pharmacy -- a journal not known for stirring controversy. In a press release, Michael McGuffin, president of the American Herbal Products Association, accused Gurley of expressing opinions that went beyond "his professional expertise."

"That's pretty funny," Gurley says, "since I'm on their board of scientific advisors."

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