Prosecutors drop charges in cancer drugs case
Print Edition
A LEUKEMIA patient who helped more than 1,000 others by introducing them to a supplier of unlicensed medicine from India will not face prosecution, it was announced yesterday.
What he did was not illegal, the Yuanjiang City Procuratorate in central China’s Hunan Province said.
Lu Yong, a 47-year-old textile boss from Wuxi in east China’s Jiangsu Province, was diagnosed with leukemia in 2002, according to Southern Weekend magazine.
Initially, he took Swiss-made Glive, which offered the best treatment but cost 23,500 yuan (US$3,757.65) a month. In 2004 he turned to the much cheaper Indian generic Veenat, the magazine said, adding that it had similar ingredients and had proved as effective in clinical trials.
In early years, it cost 4,000 yuan for a month’s supply but by late 2014 the price had dropped to around 200 yuan, it reported.
Lu is said to have shared the details of his Indian supplier with other patients and set up an account with the supplier to get round the often complicated procedures of transferring money from China.
Lu provided the supplier with a credit card he had bought online and patients would transfer money into that account for their drugs. Lu made no profit from the transactions.
However, his bid to simplify cash transfers implicated him in a crackdown on illegal credit cards in Yuanjiang in August 2013, during which the medicine issue came to light. Since China’s food and drug administration had never authorized imports of Veenat, and thus it lacked legal paperwork, the drug had long been regarded as “fake.”
Lu was detained in Yuanjiang on November 23, 2013. Last March, he was released on bail pending trial on selling fake medicine and charges related to credit card fraud.
However, after a petition signed by 300 fellow patients, prosecutors dropped all charges.
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