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The Texas attorney general filed charges Monday against Laurie D’Alleva for allegedly selling prescription drugs like Botox from websites she owned, including discountmedspa.com.
Agents descended on her Mansfield, Texas home and carried out boxes, computers, and other possible evidence for the case, according to local news reports.
The lawsuit comes after Wired.com first reported on D’Alleva’s business practices. An Oct. 27 story detailed her website’s claims to offer prescription drugs including Renova and Dysport, the botulinum toxin-variant, as well as lip-filling gels.
Videos embedded on the site and posted to YouTube showed D’Alleva injecting Dysport, which the site calls “The Freeze,” into her own face. The videos have since been taken down, but Wired.com downloaded a copy of the video, which is posted here.
D’Alleva faces civil penalties of $25,000 per violation per day for each time she broke the rules for selling prescription drugs under the Texas Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. In a post to the website, she claimed to have more than 2,000 customers.
Allison Lowery, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said her agency referred the case to state attorney general, after completing their own investigation.
According to the lawsuit filed by the Attorney General, an investigator ordered D’Alleva’s “newbie kit” on Nov. 9, two weeks after the Wired.com report. Four days later, it arrived, containing “Restylane, one fifty unit Freeze product containing purified neurotoxin complex, two empty syringes, two syringe needles” and instructions for use.
The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A physicians’ association has also responded to Wired.com’s report. The International Association of Physicians for Aesthetic Medicine released a set of safety tips for consumers, which warns against injecting yourself with botox
“Recently, there have been several reports regarding DIY “botox-like” injectables, which can be purchased through the internet,” the IAPAM safety tips read. “A woman in Texas offered consumers a botox-like product called “Freeze,” complete with a “How-To” video, so consumers could administer the botulinum toxin themselves.”
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WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
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