Open Letter from Chemical Collective to be published on RC SCENE. What bad could happen? ;-)

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This is no super-extended director’s cut of a running gag. This is an open letter by Jacob, owner of the Dutch Research Chemicals Web Shop Chemical-Collective, asked to be published on RC SCENE.

The text was not published as-is. After reading through it, I asked Jacob to re-phrase individual paragraphs, which he agreed upon. Also, I always try to fix typos or would rephrase misleading sentences. I do this with every text published on RC SCENE and I recently subscribed to software called Grammarly to find and correct mistakes in grammar more easily. The message remains the same of course: RC SCENE bad, CHEMICAL COLLECTIVE super 😉

Hi René,

I hope this email finds you well!

I’ve had a few concerned customers, friends and fellow vendors direct me towards your site recently, prompting me to take the time to sit down and read through your articles and many comments about Chemical Collective and me that you have published over the past few months.

I thought I would connect with you personally via email rather than reply in the comment section, as they generally aren’t very constructive and can be easily manipulated (fake accounts etc.). Despite this, please treat this as an open letter – you have my permission to publish it, and I hope it will be an interesting, informative (and an incredibly long!) read. However, please publish it in its entirety to ensure complete transparency, and so things can’t be taken out of context.

Apologies for not getting in touch and replying to you sooner – I think the last we spoke was 3 months ago via Reddit. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but since then, I haven’t been as present online after having to take some time out. For most of this year, I’ve been running Chemical Collective on my own, working 14 hour days, 7 days a week, leaving little time for myself, my life, and my well being – something that was in no way sustainable. I got to a point where I literally had no choice but to stop prioritizing work over my life for the good of myself as well as the business, something I found incredibly hard to do. The danger of mixing your passion with work is genuine, but learning to get that balance right is all just part of being human, and something I’ve come to realize is essential.

To allow this, I’ve been building a team to help run and develop Chemical Collective. This hasn’t been without hiccups and presented a real learning curve. Still, it has finally given me the chance to really look towards the future of Chemical Collective, allowing me to examine what we can offer the community and start to improve things across the board.

First of all, I want to clarify that I hold no ill will towards you despite your negative review and comments about Chemical Collective, false accusations, continuous stream of misinformation, rather personal attacks and indirect threats towards me. I understand many guises as humor and irony, but I’m not sure it comes across that way to most. I’m not sure what your agenda is, but despite what others may say, a part of me still believes we have a lot in common (which is why I’m reaching out) and that there’s a lot of potential good in what you’re trying to achieve. Having a non-biased, self-financed, third party review site can only be of benefit to our community.

It would be a lie to say many of the things you have said, and the personal nature of your review didn’t really affect me when I wasn’t able to react or respond appropriately. I take a lot of pride in Chemical Collective and what I’m trying to achieve – while I try to be as polite as possible, if I ever seem argumentative or standoffish in our defense, it’s because I care. We make every effort to ensure we provide quality products and the best possible service. This doesn’t mean we can’t always do better or sometimes make mistakes, but any insinuation that we purposefully sell ‘bunk’ or cut products is, in my eyes, very unfair and, quite frankly, really hurts. The idea that any Dutch RC vendor would sell substandard products just doesn’t make any business sense and would surely be the quickest way to destroy your customer trust and reputation – two things I’ve worked tirelessly for.

At the end of the day, in our own way, we have both chosen to dedicate our lives to the RC scene, a community I have been part of for several years. I believe in the importance of the freedom of choice for people to be able to experiment as they see fit in an informed and safe way. Although I know you don’t share this idea, I really appreciate the effort you’re putting into the community. The amount of work and research you put into most vendors, safeguarding articles, and Google SEO is insane…I’ve literally learned new things about vendors that I know personally! I just wish you extended this same journalistic code and effort to us. The sheer amount of unsubstantiated and false “news” and “information” you publish about us (without linking to any sources or proof) is relentless as well as mentally and emotionally draining. If you have ANY questions, concerns, or rumors you would like to get to the bottom of about Chemical Collective, just ask us direct! Surely this would be the best way to fact check and ensure you’re releasing correct information.

Want one of the new Chemical-Collective T-Shirts? Follow this link.

When you first emailed me explaining, you were about to start a review site to combat scammers and provide honest reviews of RC vendors. Despite your pretty extreme views of Drugbuyersguide, I was excited to have someone offer a new alternative. At that time, DBG represented the only active English language forum to engage with and advertise to the RC community, something I had to do to initially build the new business. However, the idea of a de-monetized alternative and your reasons behind this resonated with me.

We happily chatted back and forth, and I gave you some (hopefully) helpful advice on building the RC-Scene website to help you achieve your goal…then, out of the blue, your tone completely changed, and you published your review of Chemical Collective. Since then and in my absence, you have really tried to paint me as the root of all evil in the RC scene consistently across your site. So much so, it feels less of a site about our shared scene and more of an opportunity to try and bash Chemical Collective and me as much as possible. I can see my silence has only allowed things to perpetuate – something I take responsibility for – but I hope you now have a small understanding of the reasons why I haven’t responded until now.

Naturally, I would love to try and get to the bottom of all of this and rectify any wrongs I or Chemical Collective might have done to you to warrant this. I will attempt to answer some of your primary concerns that I’ve picked up from reading through your site – if I miss anything, please feel free to get in touch, and I will do my best to respond (a bit quicker this time!)

Before I get into it, I would like to say that I’m sorry you had such a bad experience with some of our products. As with all reputable RC vendors in the Netherlands, we source everything we can from Lizard Labs even though many cheaper options are available. This means there is a consistency in product quality across the leading Dutch RC Vendors, which is vital to all of us.

Here’s a list of all the vendors supplied by them: https://lizardlabs.eu/retailers

The only things we stock that aren’t from Lizard Labs (as they don’t supply them) are:

5-MMPA – from Juklislab (inventors of 3-MMC)
3-CL-PCP + 3-HO-PCE – from Longflourish
2-FDCK, 6-APB, AMT succinate- from TRRCC
5-MAPB – from Realchems

Whatever you may think of Lizard Labs’ business practices, I really do believe they consistently produce the best quality research chemicals in the world. If you know a better lab, please let me know! We receive HNMR test results with every purchase and anything we’ve bought from outside Lizard Labs, we always do our best to get tested ourselves. Moving forward, as part of our business development, we’ll be third party testing EVERYTHING – even chems from Lizard Labs themselves – and putting the results directly on our new website along with more in-depth product information and links to resources for further study.

3-FPM & 3-FEA

Our 3-FPM and 3-FEA were sourced from Lizard Labs and, therefore, the same as many other vendors in the Netherlands. I’ve attached the HNMR test results by Lizard Labs on our 3-FPM and 3-FEA batches at the time of your review, as well as the 3rd party test report on the 3-FEA that we commissioned out of concern when the same customer that got in touch with you, also got in touch with us. We removed 3-FEA from the shelves and refunded the customer while we waited for the results, which came back with a 97% purity, and these were verified by an independent Reddit user.

We couldn’t get 3rd party HNMR tests done on the 3-FPM as by that point, we had already taken it off sale due to the emerging reports of risks related to its research. It’s important to remember that HNMR tests only show the purity and chemical makeup of a sample. Causticity and other potential risks are not shown and can only be found out through further research. This is the nature of Research Chemicals, and we advise everyone to be as pro-active as they can and report their findings for the community to see. We all have a part to play in this.

3FEA 3rd party lab results independently verified:

CAUSTIC

In response to the caustic comments – 3FPM is very well documented for being potentially acidic/caustic and presenting a “burn” upon research, something which we can personally attest to, although in our experience, it does seem to vary slightly batch by batch.

A small selection of 3FPM “burn” and “caustic” reports:

how are the current batches of 3 FPM? from researchchemicals

3-fpm oral causticity from researchchemicals

Holy damn, did I underestimate 3-FPM’s causticity from researchchemicals

3-fpm insufflation from researchchemicals

PS: Even if you say that Realchems 3-FPM wasn’t caustic at all (they used to source with Lizard Labs but have their own exclusive supplier now), there are emerging reports of health risks (like addiction, etc.). I think the risks need to be talked about. I wouldn’t want to give it away to ANYONE.

1CP-LSDAs

For the 1CP-LSD you received (also sourced from Lizard Labs), we have only had one bad review – yours. A pretty high success rate by anyone’s terms and something we’re very proud of. It’s hard to say why your order was ineffective – exposure to moisture, light, or heat during transport or storage, user tolerance, storage or handling error from our end, or a manufacturing error – anyone could be the culprit. Due to the <0.06226% negative reports on the product, we have yet to have a need to get it third party tested, however moving forward, as with all our other products, we will. Our storage and handling procedures are currently being updated for all products, including new cold storage units.

DCK

Regarding the customer who washed our DCK (the same “sandy” batch from Lizard Labs that you received from us in your review) in acetone and said they lost 50% of the product. Firstly, washing in this manner is really not recommended and is in no way a reliable method to test a chemicals purity. As soon as we saw his post, we had that batch sent off for third party testing and it came back as >98% purity. Once again we also published these test results publicly on Reddit in response and an active member of the community verified their legitimacy (see links above). To date, to my knowledge this is the only negative review we have had of our DCK and the customer replied subsequently stating upon washing again, he only lost 20% (see reddit links above) showing the unreliable nature of that process.

All our Lizard Labs and third party test reports are attached to this email for you to examine in detail. If you have any questions on their legitimacy, feel free to contact Lizard Labs or us for verification.

3-FEA H NMR Lab Test Result showing purity
https://rc-scene.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/st-38-3-fea-hcl-cdcl3.pdf

3-FPM H NMR Lab Test Result showing purity
https://rc-scene.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/3fpmh-22-1h-nmr.pdf

DCK H NMR Lab Test Result showing purity
https://rc-scene.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/st-42-dck-cdcl3-.pdf

SHIPPING IN MULTIPLE ENVELOPES

Addressing our policy of splitting shipments over multiple envelopes – we do this to ensure maximum deliver-ability despite additional cost to ourselves. We usually don’t do this within the Netherlands as a rule, but it does sometimes happen.

EXIT SCAM / BUST

Our Headspace account was suspended for a few days back in August after rumors of a bust due to our site being down. This was caused by our own scheduled security tests. Once we notified the mods, our account was re-activated and has been active since.

CHEM THEORY

Sadly not an exciting murder mystery! Chem Theory was run as a partnership between myself and a business partner. After he checked in to rehab, I was left running the shop and the business on my own, putting all my efforts into something that was only 50% mine and operating in a way I disagreed with. I quickly realized that many darker sides of the RC market often took precedence over customer trust, the well being of the community, and even the well being of the business, something that didn’t sit well with me. When it became clear this wasn’t going to change, I bought out my partner’s share and set up Chemical Collective, allowing me to move in a more legitimate direction that I believed in.

IMPRINT

I purposely created Chemical Collective with the (perhaps naive) idea of actively trying to be as open, transparent, and legitimate as we possibly can as an RC vendor and tax-paying business. While we don’t provide an imprint for very valid reasons (just like yourself and most other vendors), unlike everyone else, I decided not to actively try to hide who I am or what we do. This would actually be impossible now due to you mentioning my full name, home, and business address (with picture) on your site. Ironically, punishing me for my transparency like this will probably be the very reason most other vendors will never go down this route now. As a side note, I don’t hide any of this from my family. We are thinking about providing an imprint in the future.

MISLABELLED CHEMICALS

The mislabeling of 4-HO-MiPT was 100% our fault. Although nothing can fully compensate for this kind of error, we’ve done our best to make amends to all the customers who were sent the wrong product. In my mind, this is the worst mistake any vendor can make, and the person responsible was let go for gross misconduct despite it being an honest mistake. We have been incredibly open and transparent about this, posting warnings on all forums we are part of, and have taken steps to ensure this can never happen again (we now use a sign-off system, so any packaging requires multiple confirmations from staff).

Warning: Chemical Collective Joke selling mislabeled substances! #whatAdouche #avoid pic.twitter.com/GOJ7dQlrd4
— KØMPRØMÆT :: Research Chemicals (@rc_scene) September 11, 2020

About the mislabeled substances

View post on imgur.com

The Mislabeled substances would have looked too similar, was the excuse more or less.

We really do try our best to minimize potential harm to the community and to be a positive part of it, making the big decision many months ago to stop selling any chemicals we wouldn’t happily conduct research with ourselves – such as benzos, opioids, cathinones, etc. and have always refused to sell cannabinoids.

On the one hand, I really believe in personal choice and the freedom to research – that every researcher should have access to whatever suitable quality materials they choose. On the other hand – I don’t want to encourage researchers into buying benzos, opioids, or cannabinoids due to the well-documented harm they can potentially cause. Despite the apparent financial hit, at the end of the day, it just seemed like it would be hypocritical and unethical to sell something we would not conduct research with ourselves. As someone with a unique insight into the RC scene, I would love to hear your opinion on this as it is a constant dilemma: Personal freedom vs. vendor responsibility.

We’re also currently looking into either creating our own reagent tests or stocking them to give away for free with orders so customers can test their chemicals personally. I think reagent tests can be somewhat unreliable and misleading when it comes to RCs, but it’s definitely better than nothing. Let me know your thoughts on this.

At the end of the day, I think we want the same things for the community. Greater honesty, transparency, and openness is only a good thing in any industry and even more so in this space that is so rife with scammers. As Chemical Collective, we are continually striving to do better and lead by example. My hope is that over time, you and I can end up on the same page as I do think we see eye-to-eye on a lot of these issues but, at some point, got off on the wrong foot.

Lastly, from reading your blogs and comments, I understand some community members may have been aggressive and threatening towards you. I can only apologize for any nasty words that might have been thrown your way in defense of us. You have my full support in calling out this kind of behavior. As much as I disagree with the assertions you’ve made about us – you are free to make them – I believe no-one should be subjected to personal attacks or threats as a result. My only request is that you extend the same courtesy to me.

If you have any further questions or would like a more in-depth interview with me, feel free to get in touch. In the future, if you have ANY questions or concerns about Chemical Collective, our new website, our continuing improvements, or require assistance in any way, please know that my door is always open to you! I will respond as quickly as I can.

Kind regards and seasons greetings,

Jack

(PS: Where were you at the Waterhole on Saturday? I bought you a beer and everything!)

Click an image to enlarge it.