About & editorial policy
Last reviewed
What this is
Poison Phenibut is an independent educational project about the health risks of phenibut, an unregulated compound sold in the United States as a “supplement.” Its purpose is narrow and specific: to be the citable evidence base that people with institutional power — legislative staff, journalists, clinicians, and public-health analysts — can use to act, and to be accurate enough to survive a hostile fact-check.
It is not written for someone who is currently using phenibut, or for their frightened family. Those readers are better served elsewhere, and the banner at the top of every page routes them there. Our emergency page carries the numbers that matter.
This site covers one compound. It previously carried a second page on kratom; that was removed because a thin second topic weakens the claim to authority on the first, and depth beats breadth for a reference people are expected to cite.
Independence, funding, and conflicts
This is a self-directed, non-commercial project run by a single volunteer operator. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the CDC, FDA, DEA, SAMHSA, or any government agency, university, or healthcare organisation.
Funding: none. The site has no revenue. It sells nothing, carries no advertising, has no affiliate links, publishes no sponsored content, and has no relationship with any seller of phenibut or any competing product. It has no financial interest in any treatment provider, and no financial interest in the outcome of any legislation.
Conflicts of interest: none declared.
How claims are sourced and verified
Every substantive claim carries an inline citation to a numbered reference. Citations point to primary sources wherever one exists — CDC surveillance publications, FDA regulatory documents, statutory text, and peer-reviewed literature — rather than to news coverage or aggregator sites.
The working rules behind that:
- Bibliographic metadata is verified, not remembered. Every reference carrying a PMID or DOI was checked against the publisher’s or NCBI’s record, and each reference records the date it was checked.
- Legal status is verified against the statute itself. A jurisdiction appears on the legal status table only if we opened the statute or enrolled act and read the text. Where we could not, the jurisdiction is listed as withheld rather than guessed. Secondary sources disagree with each other on this, and at least two widely repeated claims did not survive checking.
- Case reports are labelled as case reports. A single published case describes what happened to one patient. We say so, every time, and we do not present case-report findings as rates.
- Limitations are stated by us, first. Where the evidence is thin, old, or systematically incomplete, the page says so before a critic has to.
- No invented people. There are no composite characters, no illustrative testimonials, and no fabricated quotations anywhere on this site. An earlier version of the main page carried clearly-labelled fictional composite scenarios; they were removed, because invented first-person testimony on a public-health site undermines the citations around it regardless of how honestly it is labelled.
- No dosing information. This site does not publish numeric doses for phenibut, including within summaries of published cases. A build check enforces this.
Clinical review process
No content on this site has undergone independent clinical review. That is stated plainly on every page and will not be softened or removed until it stops being true.
The review process, when a reviewer is secured, works as follows. A named reviewer with relevant credentials reads a specific page and either confirms that its clinical statements accurately reflect the cited sources or identifies what does not. Their name, credentials, affiliation, and review date are then published on that page.
What a reviewer does and does not vouch for:
- They confirm that the clinical and pharmacological statements on the page are accurate and fairly represent the cited literature.
- They do not endorse the site’s policy positions, the legislative argument, or any recommendation about scheduling.
- They do not assume responsibility for content added or changed after their review date. A material change to a reviewed page voids the byline until it is re-reviewed.
- A review is of a page at a date, not a permanent endorsement of the site.
We are actively seeking a board-certified medical toxicologist to review the clinical content. If that is you, or you can introduce us to someone, please get in touch through the contact form.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and telling us is the fastest way to get it changed. Use the contact form in §8 of the dossier.
How corrections are handled:
- Substantive errors — a wrong figure, a misread source, a mischaracterised finding, an incorrect legal status — are corrected as soon as they are confirmed.
- When a substantive correction is made, the “last reviewed” date changes and the correction is noted rather than made silently.
- Typographical and formatting fixes do not change the review date, because they are not a review.
- If a claim cannot be substantiated on re-checking, it is removed rather than hedged.
Dates and review cadence
Published . Last reviewed .
The review date on this site is a real editorial date, not a build timestamp. If nothing was reviewed, it does not move — a “last reviewed” that advances automatically on every deploy is worse than showing no date at all, because it claims a check that did not happen.
Reader privacy
This site sets no cookies for tracking, embeds no third-party scripts, and loads no third-party resources on page view — fonts are self-hosted for that reason. The only exception is the contact form, which is handled by an external form service and is labelled as such at the point of use. See the privacy policy.
Emergencies
This site is not a substitute for professional care. In the United States, call 911 for an emergency, Poison Control at 1-800-222-1222 for a suspected poisoning, or 988 for a suicidal crisis. See our emergency page.