Via Matthew Katcher, this story by Rick Kambic of the Pioneer Press (at the Chicago Tribune website)
Two suburban residents appeared in federal court Thursday morning on charges related to the sale of fentanyl and fentanyl precursors over the internet using unlicensed businesses.
Wei Xu, 52, who goes by the alias “Scarlett Hsu,” lives in Vernon Hills and operated a business known as 1717 CheMall Corp. from a warehouse at 222 Terrace Drive, Mundelein, according to a news release from the U.S. attorney’s office.
A multi-jurisdictional task force led by the Drug Enforcement Administration raided 1717 CheMall Corp. late Wednesday. Employees of neighboring businesses posted photos of the activity on social media, but the U.S. attorney’s office was unable to disclose what was recovered from the warehouse.
Xu was charged with one count of knowingly distributing a controlled substance. Prosecutors said she used the company’s website to sell “fentanyl and other controlled substances” from the site’s “estore.”
Federal prosecutors say Liangfu “Larry” Huang, 53, of Northbrook, ran a business known as Ark Pharm Inc., which operated from a warehouse at 1840 Industrial Drive, Libertyville, until recently moving to 3860 N. Ventura Drive, Arlington Heights, according to the federal complaint.Also via Matthew, check out the website.
Looks like you can't buy fentanyl "for laboratory purposes only" and escape the long arm of the law. [Nods] Good to know.
Wow, I bought a neat chlorosugar intermediate from them. Hope I don't need more of it now.
ReplyDeleteThey had good prices for heterocyclic compounds.
ReplyDeleteyeah i bought a lot of good heterocycles for work through ArkPharm. This sucks
DeleteI'm really curious to find out more about this story. Synthesizing good quality organic compounds for somewhat reasonable prices seems to be a lot of effort as a cover for illicit drug sales. I wonder if the lure of the illicit trade was too much to resist, or if a rogue employee was responsible? In any case, I hope I'm not on the DEA's radar for purchasing many legit drug discovery heterocycles from Ark Pharm over the years.
ReplyDeleteThe criminal complaints make for good reading.
ReplyDelete“I receive an update from the lab that the synthesis going smooth so far, and they need one week to get the crude product, one week to purify, and one week to do the testing. For some reason there is only one lab willing to take your project. I will keep you posted.” And they even provided the NMR of the completed butyryl fentanyl.
It is cringe-worthy because these clowns disregarded the Controlled substance act and were all to happy to make any sort of category I scheduled superpotent designer fentanyl or NBOMe phenethylamine hallucinogen for you and fedex it to your dorstep in a 25g quantity for a modest price, as long as you pretended it was a research chemical "not for human use"
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIndeed they are one of the best vendors for some of the rare intermediates. Hope they will come back to business soon.
ReplyDeleteI think Ark Pharm is the company that told me when I order chemicals that were only 'in stock in China' it only added 2 days to the shipping, which I always thought was impressive/suspicious. So if I ordered something with 2 day shipping it would show up in 4 days. Seems like they likely shipped chemicals under false labeling, as plastics or whatnot.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of things that you can no longer purchase "for laboratory purposes only" without imperial interference: pentaerythritol, carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, chloral hydrate, and the list goes on.
ReplyDeletepure business retaliation from suppliers such as combiblocks, astatech, oakwood products, matrix scientific, who had to suffer when ark pharm took 20-million-dollar worth of business per year for the last 4-6 years. That's a whopping $100 million, guys. Ark pharma has to die or go away for a little bit.
ReplyDeleteHi ,
DeleteI am the new global supply manager for Ark Pharm, Inc. The article above is hilariously inaccurate. All of our products are still available at our new website below. Please feel free to shoot me an email at our new emails below!!!
sales@arkpharmusa.com
arkpharmusa.com
jaguilar@arkpharmusa.com
Ark Pharm seems to be back up and running. They want to know if I still want my pending orders. I'm debating it...
ReplyDelete