Hi-Tech CEO sentenced for fake drugs

Jared R. Wheat is ordered to serve 50 months in federal prison and must forfeit $3 million gained through the production and marketing of counterfeit drugs - including Xanax, Vioxx and Viagra - with other executives from Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals. Company founder and CEO Wheat, along with his co-conspirators, established a drug manufacturing facility in rural Belize that "complied with none of the sanitary, hygienic or quality-control regulations issued by the FDA," and subsequently sold unauthorized drugs online without a prescription, the Department of Justice says in a Feb. 3 release. Judge Jack T. Camp of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia also places the Norcross, Ga.-based supplement firm on five years' probation. A separate case in which Hi-Tech was charged with making false and misleading claims about its supplement products did not play into the criminal prosecution (1"The Tan Sheet" Aug. 25, 2008, p. 7)