Safe Chain owners Charles and Adam Boyd sentenced for nationwide black market HIV drug scheme
March 13, 2026
Today, a federal judge in Florida sentenced Charles and Patrick Boyd to a cumulative 38 years in prison.
The brothers owned Safe Chain Solutions, a Cambridge, Maryland-based drug distributor at the center of a diversion ring that endangered the health of American patients by selling 85,247 counterfeit bottles of secondhand HIV medicine worth more than $250 million to U.S. pharmacies.
A March 11 sentencing memo shows that federal prosecutors sought decades-long sentences for the men, who they said " orchestrated a nationwide HIV drug diversion scheme that harmed vulnerable HIV-positive patients, placed countless others at risk, and corrupted the supply chain for prescription drugs in the United States, all in pursuit of profit...with full knowledge of the serious harm their reprehensible crimes could, and did, cause."
The U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida filed criminal charges against the Boyds and fellow proprietor Adam Brosius in June 2024 after Gilead Sciences, whose HIV treatments were heavily trafficked by the ring, filed a Lanham Act suit against participating companies and individuals in 13 states. Brosius pleaded guilty in April 2025 and sentenced to eight years in prison in November, but the Boyd brothers chose to stand trial. In October 2025, they were convicted of:
- conspiracy to introduce misbranded drugs
- introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce
- conspiracy to traffic in medical products with false documentation
- conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and
- wire fraud.
Learn more about this and other supply chain breaks affecting HIV medicines, or read documents from USA v. Safe Chain Solutions.
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