Penalties for illegal use of leanness-enhancing drugs too light, scandal keeps growing

In recent days a string of leanness-enhancing drug cases has erupted in meat products at home and abroad, and the food safety panic and political fallout they have triggered appear to be closing in on last year’s "plasticizer storm." Besides imported meat products frequently testing positive for ractopamine residues, domestic meat products have also repeatedly been found to contain other kinds of leanness-enhancing drugs.Although agricultural, health and police-prosecution authorities have uncovered and prosecuted many cases of selling leanness-enhancing drugs and other illegal veterinary drugs, the courts have handled every trial by summary judgment, and the vast majority of offenders received sentences of no more than one year.

Although both the central and local governments claim that last year in Yunlin County they broke up an illegal veterinary drug ring that smuggled and sold the leanness-enhancing drug "Colterol," and that the court handed the smuggler a heavy sentence of more than five years, a reporter for News&Market browsing the Judicial Yuan website’s judgment search system found only that the Yunlin District Court sentenced a man surnamed Liu, who used "Colterol" to make the animal feed "garlic essence," to 1 year in prison with a 5-year suspended sentence, and a man surnamed Su, responsible for selling the "garlic essence," to 6 months in prison with a 3-year suspended sentence, while the main culprit surnamed Lin, who smuggled the "Colterol," is still being investigated by prosecutors in a separate case.

In other words, it is truly necessary to clarify whether the administrative agencies mistook a "5-year suspended sentence" for a "5-year prison sentence" and grew complacent about their achievements in cracking down on illegal leanness-enhancing drugs. In fact, a News&Market reporter compiling court judgments from the past three years found that prosecutors and judges have handled cases of illegally selling and using leanness-enhancing drugs by summary judgment, with the heaviest sentence being only 1 year and 4 months, while the vast majority of sentences were under one year and convertible to a fine, and the defendants also received suspended sentences at the same time. (See the table.)

Reference materials

Control Yuan investigation report – improper control measures for "leanness-enhancing drugs": the Council of Agriculture, the Department of Health and the Yunlin County Government were corrected