Zhou had reason to soothe the buyers' concerns. His supplements were not simply made of herbs and other natural ingredients; they contained a pharmaceutical drug, an appetite suppressant called sibutramine that is no longer sold in the U.S. because of safety concerns.
The U.S. government's pursuit of Zhou, who is now serving time in federal prison, sheds light on an illegal practice that regulators say is increasingly common: adding drugs to products aimed at helping people lose weight, have better sex or bulk up, and labeling them as dietary supplements.
Such "supplements" have sickened customers young and old who do not realize they are consuming powerful medications. Some of the drugs are experimental and not approved for use under any circumstances.
"We consider it a very, very big problem," said Dan Fabricant, director of theU.S. Food and Drug Administration'sDivision of Dietary Supplement Programs. "If we went out there today, to the Web or to certain retail outlets, we would have absolutely no problem finding products that are tainted."
Operations like Zhou's operate largely off the FDA's radar, producing their products in unregulated factories overseas, using anonymous email addresses and aliases to sell them as dietary supplements over the Internet to U.S. middlemen, and shipping them through the mail in packages marked with innocuous labels like "rice."
Since 2008, the FDA has announced warnings or recalls on about 400 dietary supplements containing hidden pharmaceuticals, Fabricant said, adding that the recalls represent a fraction of what is out there. He called the real numbers "staggering."
Trade organizations for the dietary supplement industry say the problem is troubling for consumers and for responsible companies that make and sell supplements.
