10 arrested after ‘German’ diet pills found to be made in China and laced with banned substance
Police allege that the defendants were part of a multimillion-yuan operation that made, sold and distributed weight-loss pills laced with the banned additive sibutramine
Ten people will face trial in eastern China for allegedly making and selling weight-loss drugs containing a banned substance, touting them as popular diet pills from Germany.
Police claimed the profit margins from the multimillion-yuan diet pill operation were greater than those of some kinds of drug trafficking, Chinese media reports said.
The pills were made in a rural workshop in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, and laced with sibutramine, an appetite suppressant banned in China since 2010 after it was found to induce strokes and heart attacks.
Police began investigating the case in June 2016 when a man reported that three bottles of a weight loss pill he bought online did not have a production or expiration date and looked like counterfeits, the Yangtze Evening News reported on Sunday.
Officers traced the vendor to a person in Suzhou who bought the pills from a wholesaler and retailed them online, mostly through social media, the report said.