Our Story
We like to solve hard problems worth solving. And boy, did we find one.
We’re hell-bent on products you can actually feel. No jitters. No crash. No borrowed pills.
1-in-4 college students misuse ADHD meds to keep up.
The Problem
They were borrowing pills. We were taking notes.
Borrowing a roommate’s script before finals became so normal it stopped feeling risky like it should. That seems less like a character flaw, and more like what happens when an entire product category fails to deliver while the stakes keep rising anyway.
Most people have no idea what healthy focus is supposed to feel like. It can be subtle. Unremarkable. Without a baseline, how would they know what they were missing? The solution just needed the right person...
Ryan had spent years using himself as a human guinea pig, chasing his own potential by swallowing every promising nootropic compound he could get his hands on. He knew what worked. What didn’t exist was a formula built to the standard that actually mattered: most people had to feel it working.
We knew the real number had to be higher. For every college student willing to admit they committed a felony, there were way more that would just lie.
Founder/Illicit Labs
The Formula
18 months. A PhD-led formulation team. One rule: make it clean, make it felt.
Ryan hit up his longtime collaborator Brian Dixon (a PhD in Molecular & Cellular Biology and 25-year master formulator) with an intriguing challenge that was equal parts basic and brutal for a scientist: build a nootropic stack that’s both clean and visceral (meaning you can feel it). Dr. Dixon even admitted that he couldn’t feel most nootropics himself, so he was intrigued to find out if it was even possible.
They spent a year and half in the lab with a team of PhD-led formulators, grinding through batch after batch until the formula held up where it counted: on real people.
We ran a pilot with 150 people before launch. The feedback was clear: EZ-A worked for the vast majority, and most found it to be potent AF (even me).
Co-founder/Illicit Labs
The result is our Hyper Strength™ stack, 10 super-nootropics selected for their individual research profiles and the way they work together. Caffeine paired with L-Theanine for activation without the edge. Methylated B Vitamins in forms your body can actually absorb. A full cognitive support formula built to be felt, not just marketed.*
EZ-A is the first product under the Illicit Labs name, but definitely not the last. Wink, wink!
The Real Purpose
Real brands have a purpose, and ours is way deeper than just “brainmaxxing.”
Ryan works on Illicit Labs every day with his autistic son in mind. Max is, as Ryan puts it, his greatest teacher.
Raising Max made one thing impossible for our founder to ignore: the world is not built for every kind of mind. The families navigating that reality do it with love and grit, and almost never with enough support. That's the deeper reason EZ-A exists.
As the company grows, a share of what we build goes directly toward the neurodivergent families and communities that deserve it.
Every product we sell moves that forward.
