First off, ephedrine is not banned and is/will be still availible for the the forseeable future. Ephedra is banned now, which really who cares, as ephedrine is better anyway.
Norephedrine and ephedra were banned because of two reasons.
1. Crystal Meth production
2. Pharmaceutical companies not being able to compete with weightloss drugs they don't have a patent on which cost $10-20 dollars for a two month supply in comparsion to their own weight loss drugs that cost in upwards to $500 a month and don't work anywhere near as well as the cheaper OTC weightloss drugs mentioned above.
And yes, the NYC stack was everything the hype said it was. The only downside to this stack was the the nor and yohimbe make you feel very weird thru out the day, not the jazzed up high that ephedrine gives you.
I just bought two bottles of the AF NYC from an Elitefitness member and still have 2 bottle of the original Adipokinetix and 1 bottle of Lipokinetix(the all time fatloss king supplement). So I'm all set thru my next 5 cutting cycles.