January 27, 2025: Another Canadian sentenced for fake prescription pill sales
Major Stories
A Canadian man got thirty years for selling Americans counterfeit Xanax on the dark web. A New York spa owner was arrested after he allegedly injected patients with fake Botox.
CTV reporter Stephane Giroux posted about the bust that included Arden McCann in October 2015.
Purported pictures of Alexandre Beaudry's lab posted to Reddit in 2017. Learn more about this case.
A federal judge in Georgia sentenced Canadian national Arden McCann to 30 years in federal prison for operating a distribution ring that sold millions of counterfeit Xanax pills to U.S. customers in 49 states.
McCann was arrested in Quebec in October 2015 when Canadian authorities identified him as a seller known as “DRXanax” on the dark web. They seized two million counterfeit Xanax pills, five pill presses, alprazolam powder, and 3,000 MDMA pills during that investigation. Somehow McCann continued to sell narcotics on more than ten dark web marketplaces after that arrest: U.S. investigators found that between November 2015 and February 2020, he distributed drugs to 49 U.S. states and grossed more than $10 million in sales. McCann’s U.S. prosecution was delayed from when he was charged in 2020 until he was extradited from Canada in June 2022.
Incredibly, McCann isn’t the only Quebec resident being prosecuted for large scale counterfeit pill trafficking. Federal courts are also prosecuting Alexandre Beaudry, who allegedly sold U.S. buyers more than 15 million counterfeit Xanax pills and other narcotics from October 2015 to October 2017. Although courts in Montreal agreed that Beaudry could be extradited in April 2024, court fillings suggest that his case has not yet moved forward.
Schemes like these have cost the lives of many Americans, among them Joshua Holton, a bright young man who died in 2016 after taking a Xanax pill he didn’t know was made of fentanyl. Joshua bought the pill from a dark web seller after seeing a Ted Talk claiming that user reviews were a reliable way of ensuring “a certain level of purity and quality” of products.
Examples of the counterfeit Botox responsible for sickening people across the country (FDA, April 2024)
The owner of a medical spa in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan in New York is facing criminal charges after he allegedly imported counterfeit Botox and other drugs from countries in Asia and treated his patients with them, without the appropriate medical license. A criminal complaint alleges that several patients developed symptoms of, and some were diagnosed with, botulism after receiving these injections in March and April 2024. It also claims that the spa owner continued to buy from the source of the counterfeit injections even though he knew their products had harmed his clients. These incidents coincide with CDC warnings in April 2024 about similar incidents in 9 states.
Patient safety issues in the GLP-1 space this week
On January 13, 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned Hong Kong-based www.weightcrunchshop.com (now offline) to stop offering non-FDA approved oxycodone and semaglutide injections to U.S. customers.
A British reality TV star reported that she “nearly died,” suffering days of vomiting and diarrhea after injecting Ozempic she bought on the black market.
A January 23 Reddit post is an example of the dangerous confusion compounded and black market GLP-1s can cause patients. The poster writes:
"Hi! I have a vial of 10mg tirzepatide peptides. I need to mix it, but I am unsure of what amount of reconstitution liquid to add to the vial to get 5mg/0.5 doses. I’ve been using this calculator and it doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know the difference between dose of peptide and peptide strength."
Domestic News
Federal judges in Oregon, Pennsylvania and New York sentenced defendants who distributed unapproved and counterfeit medicines.
Jennifer McConnon, of Keizer, Oregon, received a three-year probation sentence after pleading guilty to dropshipping and mass marketing hundreds of thousands of unapproved or counterfeit tapentadol, lorazepam, alprazolam, clonazepam, diazepam, carisoprodol, ketamine and tramadol pills, smuggled from India to sell throughout the U.S. The prosecutions of McConnon’s daughter and “Bunny Jinn,” the leader of the scheme, are still in progress.
A federal court in Pennsylvania sentenced Ecuadorian physician Mauricio Sarmiento to a year of probation for dispensing unapproved, Ecuadorian medicine to patients while providing medical care and prescription drugs during visits to the United States.
Kyle Weiland, of Tuxedo Park, New York, received a 63-month federal prison sentence for making and selling pills made of methamphetamine, amphetamine, oxycodone, various benzodiazepines, or analogs of these substances to buyers on the dark web. Weiland also agreed to forfeit almost $2.1 million, two Maserati GranTurismos and a McLaren 570S.
International News
A payment application cancelled contracts with several illegal online pharmacies. Counterfeit incidents in Vietnam and Pakistan.
A suspected fentanyl pill seized in Newfoundland this month. (RCMP)
Sezzle terminated its relationships with several illegal online Canadian pharmacies last week. The sellers were using the buy now, pay later app to process credit card payments. The change came after a Substack calledThe Bear Cave called the company out for facilitating illegal prescription drug sales.
Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested two men in Newfoundland, seizing a pill press and hundreds of fentanyl and oxycodone pills.
Police in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam busted a ring that distributed traditional Eastern medicine adulterated with pharmaceuticals. It’s one of several such rings Vietnamese authorities have shut down in recent years, including one which leveraged social media to sell medications and beauty products.
The Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) warned that counterfeit ketamine and counterfeit Ocrevus had been found in circulation. The drugs, an anesthetic and a treatment for multiple sclerosis, were falsely labeled as European products.