Canadian Pleaded Guilty To Misbranded Animal Drugs Charges For a Second Time

The U.S. Department of Justice announced a guilty plea from Alain Lamontagne, a resident of Middletown, New York. Lamontagne, a Canadian citizen, pleaded guilty to two counts of introducing into interstate commerce misbranded animal drugs. In 2012, he pleaded guilty in Ontario to the Canadian equivalent of the same crime.

According to court documents, Lamontagne ran a website called www.equinesolutions.com, which sold horse supplies such as dietary supplements and tack equipment. After several months, during which time Lamontagne exchanged emails with an undercover U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations (FDA-OCI) agent, the defendant emailed a list of intravenous (IV) drugs he could sell to the agent.

According to the sworn testimony of that agent, in both March and May of 2017, Lamontagne sold two bottles of IV horse drugs to him. The bottles had labels from Trutina Pharmacy in Ontario, Canada. Deputy Constable Allan LeBlanc Ontario Provisional Police interviewed the owner of the pharmacy who confirmed that he had never sold any drugs to Lamontagne and showed that their labels looked drastically different from the labels affixed to the bottles that Lamontagne sold. LeBlanc told the agent that in 2012, Lamontagne pleaded guilty to Labeling A Drug in a False Manner and Preparing Drugs Under Unsanitary Conditions after a Canadian investigation into Lamontagne’s sales of unapproved and misbranded drugs for equine use. He received a sentence of twelve months probation. An analysis at the FDA Forensic Chemistry Center showed the liquid in the bottles contained stanozolol, a Schedule III controlled substance that was not listed on the label.

This time Lamontagne is facing up to one year in jail and a $100,000 fine on each of the two counts. FDA-OCI investigated this case.