Sammye,

I'm not really surprised by this. Amazon doesn't do a great job of policing its listings, even the ones that are listed as "Sold by and ships from Amazon.com." My company goes to great lengths to make sure our chemicals go only to legitimate businesses. We check every address to make sure it isn't a residential address. We don't sell to anyone without a federal tax ID number. We only sell through registered distributors. Yet you can find 20 pages of our items for sale on Amazon that we didn't list there. At least whoever listed them had enough sense to only list items that aren't DOT regulated for shipment, but there is no hazard information or Prop 65 warning on Amazon's website. And some of the listed products cause cancer.

Without seeing the shipping envelope, I would guess that your bottles of sodium azide didn't come from HiMedia, and they may not have any idea how they got to you. Last year one of our customers sent us a picture from his local newspaper of chemicals from a meth lab, and one of them was ours with our label on it. How did it get to them? We certainly didn't ship it. Was it one of our distributors? Was it stolen? Was it part of a lab buyout that was then listed on Amazon or ebay or other site with few controls? Just like the owl with the Tootsie pop, the world may never know.

I found this article of particular interest because in September I received a bubble mailer with 2 hundred gram bottles of sodium azide in my mailbox sent by USPS to me from someone in the general public asking that I, "use or dispose of safely".  Fortunately for me, and the postal workers, the bottles were not damaged in mailing. 

I am currently working with the USPI and the Homeland Security Coordinator for the state to track down the sender.  This interesting part of this story is that the chemicals were purchased on AMAZON
(https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=sodium+azide) from a company called HiMedia - the same as the bottle shown in the listserve article.  These are bottles clearly marked, "For sale in India only"

The chemical mailed to me was in what appears to be the original AMAZON mailer and so it appears they are shipping this chemical with no protection or placards. I am dumbfounded that Amazon can sell this chemical and ship without warning.
Sammye
 

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