Canadian jailed for selling fake cancer meds online

Canadian national Hazim Gaber has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison by a court in Phoenix, USA, for selling fake cancer drugs on the Internet.

21-year-old Gaber was indicted by a federal grand jury in June last year on five counts of wire fraud for selling counterfeit cancer drugs through the website DCAdvice.com, and was arrested in July 2009 in Frankfurt, Germany.

At a plea hearing in May, Gaber admitted selling what he falsely claimed was the experimental cancer drug sodium dichloroacetate or DCA to at least 65 victims in the USA, Canada, UK, Belgium and the Netherlands.

In reality Gaber supplied a white powdery substance based on starch, dextrin, dextrose or lactose, along with a fraudulent certificate of analysis from a fictitious laboratory. More details from the case are available here.

On August 25 Judge James Teilborg sentenced Gaber to 33 months in jail, and also levied a $75,000 fine, as well as $53,724 in restitution. He will also have to serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.

DCA has become highly sought-after by cancer patients, particularly since the results of a small study in patients with a form of brain cancer known as glioblastoma were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine in May.

However, the study was never intended to investigate a therapeutic effect of DCA, rather to identify a dose suitable for further testing, and UK medical charity Cancer Research UK says at the moment there is no evidence of to support its use in treating cancer and it may even be harmful if taken without accurate dosing and medical supervision.