5,000 Shipments of Unapproved Weight-Loss Injectables Were Seized in Ohio Last Month. The Supply Chain Behind Them Is Alarming

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer opened a package on a loading dock at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The package’s manifest stated that it was a “cosmetic weight loss product.” There were injectable pens containing tirzepatide (Mounjaro) in doses of 2.5 mg, 5 mg, and 7 mg. The package was addressed to a private home in Ohio and had come from a pharmacy in the United Kingdom. It’s highly likely that the person who was waiting for that package thought they were getting a genuine prescription drug at a cost they could afford. What they were getting was a seizure waiting to happen and, depending on what was in those vials, potentially a health risk they couldn’t assess.

That one seizure in October of 2024 was not an exception. The same port received a second shipment, this time from Hong Kong, two weeks later. It was once more bound for a home in Ohio and included 20 vials of semaglutide and 150 vials of tirzepatide, totaling about $45,000. By August 2025, a joint CBP-FDA operation at the port of Cincinnati had intercepted 54,843 counterfeit and unapproved products in a single sweep — $3.53 million worth of pharmaceuticals labeled as Ozempic, Semaglutide, Retatrutide, Tirzepatide, plus Botox, dermal fillers, erectile dysfunction medications, and contact lenses. These goods were on their way to 40 different states.

It’s worth pausing to consider the scope of this. forty states. from just one port. in a single process. Furthermore, CBP officials have made it clear that these seizures are a regular, continuous interception activity rather than an isolated incident. “CBP officers in Cincinnati work tirelessly to combat the importation of illegal shipments,” Director Field Operations-Chicago LaFonda D. Sutton-Burke said in a statement after the August operation. When a problem’s volume necessitates a continuous response rather than a focused campaign, agencies employ that framing—”work tirelessly.”

The nations of origin serve as a signal of their own. According to recent CBP releases, the shipments that were seized originated in South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Colombia. That’s not a small criminal enterprise or a single rogue supplier. In order to reach customers who are, for the most part, placing online orders from websites with no regulatory accountability at all, GLP-1 drugs—or products labeled as GLP-1 drugs—must be transported across several continents and through numerous jurisdictions. More than 5,000 GLP-1 products were seized by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency in 2025 alone, and more than 1,500 websites and social media accounts that were unlawfully promoting these products were taken down. Demand in Britain is fed by the same pipeline that supplies the American gray market, and the disruptors on both ends are trying to catch up with a supply chain that regenerates more quickly than it can be shut down.

The nature of who is placing the order makes this especially challenging to contain. These shipments, which frequently go to private residences rather than commercial establishments, are being bought by people who are attempting to obtain drugs that they are aware are available and effective but are either too expensive or difficult to get through traditional channels. GLP-1 medications are costly. After a spike in demand, supply shortages continued for years. Alternatives were being offered by compounding pharmacies, but the FDA later restricted them as well, driving some customers deeper into the black market. When you don’t give people a safe way to get what they want, they find another way, as Jordan Glenn of SuppCo pointed out in a different but related context. The path they discover might involve a Hong Kong-sourced vial with no way to confirm the contents.
The risk becomes tangible and immediate in that verification problem. The labeled concentration does not match the actual concentration, according to independent testing. Products are mislabeled; an item marketed as one compound might actually contain another. In the worst situations, products are not sterile or are contaminated. The downstream reality of the gray market supply chain that CBP is intercepting in Ohio at the rate of thousands of shipments per operation is a person at home, drawing from a vial they received in the mail, injecting a substance whose actual chemical contents are unknown.
Ohio has also made progress on the supply side. In September 2025, the Ohio Board of Pharmacy declared that it would be closely monitoring compounding pharmacies that manufacture copies of weight-loss medications. It specifically targeted the large-batch production model that some pharmacies had been using to anticipate prescriptions. Although it’s a reasonable regulatory response, it only tackles a small portion of a much bigger global issue. Demand is typically redirected rather than eliminated when one access point is closed.

It is difficult to ignore the fact that the public health and enforcement perspectives are diverging. The frequency of seizures is increasing. The demand is increasing more quickly. Around enforcement actions, the infrastructure—websites, social media accounts, international shipping networks—seems to rebuild with ease. At the ports of entry, CBP and the FDA are doing their best. There is never a satisfactory response to the question of whether that is sufficient given the scope of what is passing through.