February 10, 2025: NY woman allegedly injected mystery substances instead of Botox
Major Stories
Mystery cosmetic injections allegedly harmed a client in Queens. PSM addressed a misleading drug ad for compounded weight loss medicine.
A cosmetologist in Queens, New York was arrested and charged with assault after she allegedly injected a client with unknown substances that caused a rash, pain and scarring. Her arrest follows federal charges filed against a Manhattan spa owner alleged to have injected his clients with counterfeit Botox that was linked to an outbreak of a botulism-like illness in 2024. Neither defendant was licensed to perform cosmetic injections.
The Partnership for Safe Medicines submitted letters to Fox Broadcasting and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to express concern over an advertisement for Hims and Hers compounded weight loss injections that aired during the Super Bowl on February 9th. PSM believes the ad did not comply with FDA regulations for prescription medicine or clearly communicate the differences between FDA-approved and compounded drugs. Read executive director Shabbir Safdar’s editorial on the subject and PSM resources about the risks of compounded medicine.
The Queens DA posted this image of the client's neck in February 2025.
Patient safety issues in the GLP-1 space this week
National Public Radio spoke to patients worried about the quality of their weight loss injectables after learning that the pharmacy that made them was compounding without a sterile compounding license, improperly storing medicines that needed to be refrigerated and failing to document drugs it dispensed.
Domestic News
Kansas pharmacists lobbied for PBM reform.
Kansas pharmacists rallied at the state capitol to ask legislators for pharmacy benefit manager reform, citing under-reimbursement practices that are driving pharmacy closures in the state.
A federal judge in Vermont sentenced Nitin Mishra of Jaipur, India to 28 months served and a $7,300 forfeiture for his role in a ring that distributed controlled substances, including carisoprodol, tapentadol, tramadol, and zolpidem from 2019 to June 2021. Mishra was extradited from Albania to the United States to face these charges.
Federal prosecutors in Indiana announced that 29 people had received a combined 378 years in federal prison for distributing nearly 500 pounds of methamphetamine and over three kilograms of fentanyl in the southern part of the state between January 2020 and November 2021. Among those sentenced was Jeramey Smith, who manufactured and sold high volumes of pills made with fentanyl beginning in September 2021.
This 2-page summary explains the problems of PBM under reimbursements.
Drug traffickers in the Denver, Colorado and Boston, Massachusetts metropolitan areas were convicted in unrelated cases that involved using pill presses to make fentanyl pills and methamphetamine pills.
The FDA released a warning letter it sent to a Kansas compounding facility, Fagron Sterile Service, in December 2024 over insufficient product and container labels and insanitary conditions. Fagron voluntarily recalled four lots of 2% lidocaine injection because of potential contamination in August 2024.
International News
Counterfeit medicines reported in Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
The Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan issued an alert and banned the sale of a batch of antibiotic injections found in the province of Balochistan because testing found them to be counterfeit.
Uzbekistan’s State Security Service busted a counterfeit medicine lab in the Fergana region, seizing more than 400,000 units of unapproved medicines worth approximately 1.8 billion Uzbekistani Som ($139,000).