May 19, 2025: Investigations raise questions about product safety at a Texas compounding company
Major Stories
News coverage raised questions about Empower Pharmacy’s drug safety. A grand jury indicted a Chinese company and three of its employees for pill press and counterfeit die mold sales.
Recent investigative articles in the Houston Chronicle and Endpoints News raised concerns about the safety of medicines made by Texas-based compounding giant Empower Pharmacy. The articles delve into FDA warning letters sent after inspectors found that Empower used subpar, “food grade” ingredients in vitamin and weight loss injections, as well as allegations from a former employee that the company sourced ingredients from unvetted suppliers.
A federal grand jury in Texas indicted China-based CapsulCN International Co. Ltd. and three employees for selling pill presses, encapsulating machines, and counterfeit die molds to U.S. customers. According to the indictment, CapsulCN smuggled the equipment into the country with deceptive packaging and false manifests that undervalued and misidentified the contents. The company’s staff also allegedly helped customers to select the best die molds to counterfeit pharmaceutical drugs. This case follows the prosecution of Xiaofei Chen, another CapsulCN employee, who pleaded guilty to similar charges in April.
Patient safety issues in the GLP-1 space this week
A report by the Digital Citizens Alliance and the Coalition for a Safer Web details their three-month investigation into at least sixty TikTok scammers who took thousands of dollars in payments for prescription-free Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy that was ultimately never shipped. Read it here.
Reddit, May 16, 2025 (Click the image to enlarge it.)
Tirzepitide is stable for up to 21 days at room temperature up to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, but the medicine is heat- and light-sensitive. Patients shouldn’t take it if it has been exposed to higher temperatures. The same is true of semaglutide. This concern extends beyond GLP-1s; many medicines degrade if exposed to temperature extremes, and that can have serious effects for the patients relying on them.
Domestic News
More problems with eye drops. The DEA released a new National Drug Threat Assessment. Prosecutions involving pill presses and unapproved workout drugs.
BRS Analytical Service, LLC initiated a voluntary recall of over-the-counter ophthalmic products shipped between May 26, 2023 and April 21, 2025 after an FDA audit revealed manufacturing irregularities. The FDA also warned Excelvision Fareva, a French company, for failing to investigate and resolve problems with mold, black specks, and discoloration in their sterile ophthalmic products.
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment reports larger seizures of methamphetamine pills disguised as Adderall or MDMA and notes that the anesthetic medetomidine has been found mixed with xylazine and fentanyl in powders and pills.
A federal judge in Montana sentenced Greenville, Tennessee resident Tyler Jordan Hall to five years of probation for using his business, Rat’s Army, LLC, to sell unapproved drugs made from ingredients illegally imported from China to bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts. Hall made $3.8 million on this scheme between June 2020 and March 2022.
Jamar Deontae Barnes of Stockton, California, received a 16-and-a-half-year prison sentence for his role in a conspiracy that made and distributed counterfeit prescription pills made with fentanyl and other synthetic opioids and fake Ecstasy pills made of methamphetamine. A criminal complaint filed in 2019 linked this ring’s pills to 52 fentanyl poisonings and 12 deaths in the Sacramento area in March and April 2016. Nine other defendants have pleaded guilty in this case.
Detectives with the Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office seized a pill press in a home in Albemarle, Virginia.
A man in Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania is facing a felony drug charge and several misdemeanors after police officers discovered controlled substances and several pill presses in his home while treating the suspect for a suspected fentanyl poisoning.
USA Herald reports that Snap, Inc. formally responded to a 2023 lawsuit filed by families who lost children to counterfeit prescription pills sold by drug dealers working on its platform. The company asserted that “each of these deaths could have occurred under a number of circumstances—none of which hinged on the decedents’ or the drug dealers’ alleged use of Snapchat.” The ages of the victims represented in the suit range from 15 to 21.
International News
The WHO reported more lots of counterfeit Imfinzi. Counterfeit medicine news in Vietnam and India
The World Health Organization issued an alert about three batches of counterfeit Imfinzi, an injected cancer treatment, found in Iran and Turkey. This follows a December 2024 alert about fake versions of the drug in Armenia, Lebanon and Turkey.
Vietnamese courts sentenced a man to 16 years in prison for leading a counterfeiting operation that sold fake versions of a variety of medicines and vitamins.
A recent anti-counterfeiting initiative in Uttar Pradesh, India led to the seizure of ₹30.77 crore ($3.6 million) in fake medicines, including include oxytocin, narcotic drugs, and counterfeit cosmetics and cancelled licenses for more than a 1,000 drug dealers, six manufacturing units, and five blood banks.