The Dark History Behind Metabolife
Firm charged with covering up thousands of complaints
Oct 18, 2004 | AP
MOnce busted in a raid on a methamphetamine lab, Michael
Ellis went legitimate by selling pills designed to boost energy
and burn fat. His legal business soon made him a millionaire
many times over.
But his company, Metabolife International Inc., had a problem:
Its customers were winding up in emergency rooms across the
country.
Health complaints flooded headquarters. One user's heart
rate zoomed to 300 beats a minute. Another's pulse stopped
for 16 minutes. One 25-year-old woman suffered a seizure after
a week on Ellis' wonder pill.
If this became public, Ellis allegedly told one employee
who handed him a written complaint in the late 1990s, federal
regulators would ?stomp bloody holes in my chest.? So, prosecutors
say, Ellis wadded up the complaint and tossed it in the trash.
Now, Ellis and Metabolife are accused of covering up a health
crisis that escalated as the company became a diet supplement
leader.
Charges against Ellis stem from a 1998 letter to federal
regulators in which he claimed no customer had registered
even a single health complaint about Metabolife 356, his signature
product. It was a claim the company repeated a year later.
In fact, according to prosecutors, the company was receiving
a cascade of complaints some 14,000 from 1997 to 2002. Among
them: 18 heart attacks, 26 strokes, 43 seizures and five deaths.
Others may never have complained.
Ellis, 51, and Metabolife now a shadow of its former self,
no longer selling Metabolife 356 but remaining in the supplement
business call the charges ?utterly baseless? and a ?hypertechnical
violation? concocted by taking statements out of context.
A judge recently dismissed six of eight counts on the original
grand jury indictment, including obstruction of justice charges.
Remaining charges accuse the company and Ellis of lying to
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Attorneys for Metabolife and Ellis declined to speak with
The Associated Press.
The U.S. attorney's office in San Diego said it could not
comment beyond what it had disclosed in court papers.
Those papers reveal new details about Metabolife's woes.
A high school friend whom Ellis made a Metabolife board member
is facing federal gun charges. An affidavit briefly unsealed
in the gun case showed Ellis and others are under investigation
for allegedly hiding millions in overseas tax havens and personal
safes.
Last November, shortly after the documents were unsealed,
Metabolife's outside accountant, Michael Compton, committed
suicide. In a document presented to the federal judge hearing
the Metabolife case, prosecutors said Compton had admitted
falsifying tax returns for company executives, including Ellis.
Case history
Connie Thornburg thought Metabolife 356 was a miracle.
The 48-year-old mother of two from Childersburg, Ala., began
her regimen in 1999 and dropped 65 pounds fast.
?That summer, when I was on the beach in Florida with my
grandchildren, I thought I was the Queen of Sheba,? Thornburg
said.
The strokes began the following year. She suffered four and
was hospitalized 11 times before a doctor told her what was
in her diet supplements.
The main ingredients in Metabolife 356 were ephedra and caffeine,
a combination that had been discovered in Denmark a quarter-century
ago.
Ephedra is the herbal form of the stimulant ephedrine, an
ingredient in cold medicines that raises heart rates, suppresses
appetites and staves off sleep. Ephedrine also is a key ingredient
in the street drug methamphetamine.
Earlier this year, the Bush administration banned sales of
ephedra after linking it to 155 deaths. Perhaps the most famous
victim was 23-year-old Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler,
who died trying to shed pounds during spring training last
year.
Thornburg's case was the first of scores of Metabolife lawsuits
to reach trial in 2002. An Alabama jury found Metabolife 356
was unreasonably dangerous, but jurors also found that the
plaintiffs had failed to follow directions. The company is
appealing the $4.1 million verdict.
Thornburg says she'd give anything for the chance to talk
to Ellis, an ex-cop.
?What police officer,? she said, ?wouldn't know that the
same ingredient in crystal meth or speed wouldn't harm people??
According to the company Web site, Ellis discovered the formula
for Metabolife 356 in 1989 while searching for something that
would give his father energy to fight terminal cancer.
It was also the year Ellis and Michael Blevins, the longtime
buddy he would later make a Metabolife co-owner, were indicted
in what the Drug Enforcement Administration called the biggest
single roundup of methamphetamine manufacturers in U.S. history.
Blevins had bought chemicals and lab materials from a supply
house that was part of a massive undercover drug sting. Federal
agents raided the home Ellis rented in Rancho Santa Fe, an
exclusive San Diego suburb, and found a clandestine methamphetamine
laboratory. A forensic chemist determined that more than 50
pounds of methamphetamine had been made in the house.
Facing prison time on the methamphetamine charges, Ellis
cut a deal. He became an undercover FBI informant and testified
before a federal jury in 1990 about meeting a major marijuana
dealer.
'Legalized drug dealing'
Metabolife got its start less than a year after Congress
deregulated the dietary supplements industry in 1994.
The law, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who dabbled
in the vitamin business as a young man, treated dietary supplements
as food instead of drugs. Dietary supplement makers no longer
had to show their products were safe.
Under the law, Metabolife had no duty to report even the
deaths of its customers.
Congress had created "a legalized form of drug dealing,"
said Dr. Peter Lurie of the watchdog group Public Citizen,
which successfully petitioned the government in 2001 to pull
Metabolife 356 and similar pills.
There is widespread agreement that ephedra has been one of
the law's biggest oversights.
Metabolife sold more ephedra than anyone else. By 1999, the
company boasted that Americans were gobbling 225,000 of its
pills an hour. Revenues at the privately held company had
soared to more than $360 million in four years.
Nearly a decade after they created the loophole that allowed
Metabolife to flourish, federal lawmakers last year subpoenaed
Ellis and demanded to know whether he ?put sales above safety.?
Ellis took the Fifth Amendment, declining to reply. |
