The online sales company eBay will pay $59 million in exchange for dropping criminal charges in the United States for marketing equipment used in the mass manufacturing of drug tablets, the US Department of Defense announced on Wednesday. Justice.
American judicial authorities initiated these proceedings for violation of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) due to the sale on the site of
“thousands of tablet presses and encapsulating machines
,” the ministry said in a press release. .
eBay failed to comply with the identity checks and tracking and reporting obligations imposed by this law for buyers of several thousand of these devices,
"including tablet presses capable of producing thousands of tablets per hour"
, he adds.
The investigation also established that hundreds of buyers of these machines on eBay had also
"purchased counterfeit molds and stamps, as well as dyes, allowing them to manufacture tablets imitating the products of pharmaceutical companies"
and many others. Among them were brought to justice for trafficking illegal tablets, according to the same source.
“
Fentanyl, pressed into counterfeit pills that look like real drugs, is killing Americans.
"Drug traffickers buy the devices to make these counterfeit tablets online
," said the director of the federal drug trafficking agency (DEA), Anne Milgram, quoted in the press release.
Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, is the leading cause of more than 100,000 overdose deaths each year in the United States, with more than 73,000 deaths attributed to it in 2022 by health authorities.
It is the subject of tensions between the United States and China, with Chinese laboratories suspected of supplying drug traffickers, particularly Mexicans, with chemical compounds used to manufacture fentanyl.