Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals: biggest crooks in the supplement industry
by Anthony Roberts

Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals has a history of producing tainted supplements, products that do not meet label claims, misleading consumers, and perpetrating every known type of fraud on the nutritional industry. They’ve had goverment seizures on their finished products as well as their raw materials, and they have faced numerous criminal and civil charges, brought by everyone from the FDA to the FTC to other nutritional companies.

The indictment was 55 pages long, and had 46 separate counts.

Because of the company’s long history of criminal acts, Jared Wheat, the owner (and recognized as a “career criminal” by the United States government) earned himself a 50 month prison sentence, where he was joined by enough of his employees to hold regular board meetings (or field a company softball team…).

Jared Wheat’s sentence memorandum, after a very generous plea deal, was only five pages long; light reading compared to the 36 page motion the prosecution filed to oppose his bail (*allegations that Wheat conspired to kill an FDA agent was the most interesting part of that particular document). And while the government took the most serious of charges off the table and recommended 37 months in prison, the sentencing judge decided that the deal was over a year too short. Originally, it could have been 20 or more years…

And of course, many of Jared’s Hi-Tech co-defendents ultimately agreed to snitch on him – which says a lot about the character of the people working for the company.

Hi-Tech had been manufacturing their bathtub brew nutritional supplements in an unsanitary lab in Belize, where they took every possible opportunity to spike their products with everything from A to Z (and by “A to Z” I mean everything from Ambien to Zoloft, including steroids, GHB, and a bunch of other stuff). They were also running a “Canadian Pharmacy” out of Belize as well, lying to their customers about the country of origin for their generic prescription products.

Most respected names in the nutritional industry (who I’ve spoken to), believes that Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is a mediocre company, in terms of their retail products. And truthfully, I believe the company itself knows this to be true – they can’t formulate an effective sex pill, so they spike theirs with Viagra – they can’t formulate a muscle building product, so they spike theirs with steroids.

And then there’s the fake Ecstasy (with no MDMA)…which is actually the saddest part of the Hi-Tech story, because it shows that even when they are engaged in a wholly criminal enterprise (drug dealing), with a tremendous tax-free profit margin, they still feel the need to rip their customers off.

There is no honor among these thieves.

It’s pretty astonishing to see a company telling so many simultaneous lies to their customers, on so many different (and illegal) levels – I’m uncertain that the company has ever been anything less than completely deceitful. When judging a nutritional company, it’s rarely easy to find one that is rotten on every level, from the founder to the sales associates. In the case of Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals, the opposite is true – it is difficult to find a single redeeming quality in the whole business.

And most people don’t realize this, but many products that do not carry the Hi-Tech name, are produced by the company – and many higher profile supplement companies still use their services both for sourcing raws as well as bottling and capping the end product.

Hi-Tech Raws is the manufacturing arm of the company, handling not only their own products, but contract manufacturing and sourcing for numerous other companies. Although we’re not even 50 days into 2011, US Government imposed fines for companies who work with Hi-Tech Raws are now in the six-figure range. They have also been the manufacturer of several products that have been involved in some of the largest FDA recalls in recent history.

Last year, I was involved in a project to design a supplement for a company I very much wanted to work with. All of the NDAs were signed, and we were getting things off the ground with all of the usual conference calls and emails, until one day, a guy appeared on the email chain with an address from Hi-Tech Raws.

To me, the entire project was over at this point, because I was very familiar with their reputation. I had always knew about the company’s criminal record, but just to make sure, I did a background check on their civil record – not counting bankruptcy or criminal charges, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals has over 30 civil lawsuit records associated with their name:



And of course, the CEO of the company was involved in many of those lawsuits, as well as a few others within the nutritional industry:



I not only pulled the plug on my involvement with the project, but in the past few months, I have delined to accept advertising from multiple companies who use Hi-Tech as their contract manufacturer.
In 2008, the company was on the wrong end of a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, to the tune of a
$15,882,436 judgment…meaning, even after their CEO was sitting in a Georgia prison, the company continued to operate in voilation of federal guidelines.

Hi-Tech continued their pattern of flagrant contempt for the truth, earning themselves (yet another) FDA spanking, this time for their attempt at profiteering off the H1N1 scare:Clearly this is not a company who has purged itself of a few bad apples, and continued on with their legitimate business. Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals have shown themselves to be the biggest crooks in the entire supplement industry, and I can’t imagine that this pattern will be changing any time in the future.

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