User blog comment:Pawn of Atlas/Contradictions about Fontaine's and Drinkable Plasmids/@comment-1592487-20140507125303/@comment-6024608-20140508131204

Your digestive chemicals can break down/interfere with other chemicals and there is always the possibility of impaired absorbtion  by different people. Simple chemiclas can be averaged and dosed easier than this 'Plasmid + whatever' (complex genetic materials plus pahsed activation triggers to do all that stuff to your bodies tissues).

More complex stuff might not even make it intact through your digestion into the bloodstream (we are talking about RNA and DNA or virus used to introduce those components). So a 10X dosage actually isnt that far off.

Later improvements might be a plasmid/tonic modification to the user's digestive tract to facilitate transfer of these marked components of other products (which might have enabled a later effective use of drinkable ADAM products (lots of people fear sticking a knitting needle into their arms for ordinary ADAM stuff - which later they might not balk at when its Civil War 'protect myself' motives for taking it).