September 30, 2025: Florida agency requests $4 million more for $132 million empty warehouse
Major Stories
Photo courtesy of the Executive Office of Governor Ron DeSantis
Budget documents show that Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration is seeking another $4 million to maintain the warehouse for the state's Canadian Drug Importation program, reports the Florida Phoenix. Florida has already paid more than $132 million to program administrator LifeScience Logistics, which built the warehouse in 2021. Although the state won FDA approval for its importation program in January 2024, it has yet to implement the program.
Consult our Florida importation page to learn more about the state's progress.
Domestic News
The Treasury Department sanctioned two Indian nationals and an online pharmacy for fentanyl pill sales. PDABs in Oregon and Colorado are assessing medicines for upper payment limits. Federal and state regulators continue to work to protect Americans.
Facing Fentanyl launched a sign-on letter for family advocates to support the Cooper Davis and Devin Norring Act, which would require social media and tech platforms to report suspected drug trafficking to the DEA. Read it here.
On September 24, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned two Indian nationals and an online pharmacy one of them owned for supplying hundreds of thousands of counterfeit prescription pills made with fentanyl and other illicit drugs to victims across the United States. The men were among 18 people indicted for this activity in September 2024. That case is still being prosecuted.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration posted warning letters to online businesses selling unapproved medicines, including research drugs, homeopathic products, and controlled medicines and semaglutide. It also posted letters warning registered manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished medicines to correct deviations from Current Good Manufacturing Practice.
A screenshot of the KS International Traders website. The Treasury Department sanctioned the online pharmacy this month.
Prescription Drug Affordability Board Update
On August 12, Washington's PDAB Advisory Group discussed its role in the next steps of the affordability review process. Oregon’s PDAB met on August 20 reviewed methodology and discussions about whether to set upper payment limits (UPLs) for Eliquis, Xarelto, Cosentyx, and Creon. On August 22, Colorado's board continued rulemaking to set a UPL for Enbrel.
Pill presses
A Long Island, New York couple was indicted on drug trafficking charges after police seized 26 kilograms of cocaine and methamphetamine, 85 grams of fentanyl, $118,000, firearms, and a pill press from their home.
Men in New York, Maryland, and South Carolina were sentenced to 22, 12, and 20 years in prison in separate drug trafficking cases involving manufacturing fentanyl pills using pill presses.
Legislation
Keep up with state legislation in the areas of pill presses, prescription drug affordability boards, and drug importation.
Patient safety issues in the GLP-1 space this week
The Hamilton County [Texas] Sheriff’s Office warned that purported Ozempic allegedly sold by a local coffee shop owner had led to emergency room visits and hospitalizations.
This week, a Reddit poster was taken aback that a business they characterized as a legitimate clinic for testosterone replacement therapy was selling retatrutide, a drug that has no legitimate source outside of clinical trials.
We were also taken aback, because selling gray market retatrutide is a big legal risk for a licensed clinic. Ohio’s Board of Pharmacy, for example, suspended Elmntl’s license in August after the Columbus-based wellness clinic sold undercover agents retatrutide, which was listed on their website at $400 per vial. Inspectors found that the spa was using unapproved medicines from unregistered sellers; stocking expired medicine, and that the company’s owner was not a healthcare professional, as required by Ohio law.
Reddit, September 26, 2025
International News
Counterfeit Dysport reported in Israel. Pill presses in the U.K. A counterfeit medicine lab in Poland.
Counterfeit Dysport reported in Israel, September 2025
Police in Scotland announced that they had dismantled a pill press operation using nitazenes, a class of drug that has killed 38 people in Scotland so far this year. A drug dealer in Manchester, England who was caught with several pill presses in August 2024 received a seven-and-a-half-year sentence.
Israeli authorities warned residents that counterfeit Dysport, a cosmetic injectable, had been seized from a pharmacy in Haifa.
A video documenting the bust of what Poland’s federal police say was the country’s largest counterfeit pharmaceutical lab offers a view into the sophistication of these schemes.
Journalists writing about counterfeit medicines in Sudan interviewed a woman who lost her mother to malaria because the antimalarial medicine she had desperately searched for was expired.