20 State Attorneys General Target Counterfeit GLP-1 From China

Twenty state attorneys general asked the federal government on Sept. 18, 2026 to treat Chinese-sourced ingredients in compounded GLP-1 drugs as a national-security problem rather than a drug-regulatory one, in a five-page coalition letter dated Sept. 17, 2026 and addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House National Security Council. The letter is led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, and Iowa’s attorney general is one of nineteen co-signers — not the lead, as much of the same-day coverage framed it. Both attorneys general released the letter publicly on Sept. 18 in Alabama and Iowa, and the full letter is served byte-identically by both offices.

What happened

The letter itself carries Alabama letterhead, opens with “We, the Attorneys General of Alabama and 19 other States”, and its first signature is “Steve Marshall Attorney General of Alabama”. Iowa’s signature, “Brenna Bird Attorney General of Iowa”, appears further down. The lead state’s own newsroom headlined its Sept. 18 release “Attorney General Marshall Leads Coalition Alerts National Security Council to Exploitation of FDA Approved Drugs by China Supply Chain” and stated “Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall submitted a letter on behalf of 20 states to Secretary of State Marco Rubio”. Iowa’s release claims less: “Attorney General Brenna Bird joined 19 other state attorneys general in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio” — a signatory’s role, not the lead’s.

The word doing most of the work in the coverage is not in the document. Iowa’s release is headlined “Attorney General Brenna Bird Urges Federal Government to Crack Down on Dangerous Counterfeit Chinese GLP-1s”, and the same-day stories from CBS2 Iowa (“Iowa attorney general urges federal crackdown on counterfeit GLP-1 drugs from China”) and WHO Radio (“Iowa Joins 19 Other States Asking for Stronger Federal Measures on Counterfeit GLP-1 Drugs”) use it too. The letter itself never does; it describes “Chinese-sourced active pharmaceutical ingredients used in compounded GLP-1 drugs, including semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide”.

The coverage also records a limit that the letter keeps. CBS2 Iowa states as fact that “The coalition’s letter did not identify specific counterfeit GLP-1 products or say that any Iowa consumers had been harmed” — and nothing in the letter or either release names a harmed patient in any state.

Who asked for what

Both AG offices serve the same five-page PDF, 435,099 bytes, with a matching SHA-256 of 173ca31b56fb9c38… — the Iowa-hosted copy and the Alabama-hosted copy are byte-identical. It is addressed to “Secretary of State Marco Rubio 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20500” and copied to “cc: The Honorable Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services”, the State Department, and the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

The letter names its signatories collectively and the co-signing states individually. Alabama’s release lists them: “The Alabama-led letter was signed on to by attorneys general from Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia” — Alabama plus nineteen, or twenty states in total.

The ask itself is four items, all directed at the National Security Council by way of the Secretary of State. The operative sentence reads: “We respectfully ask how the NSC can help ensure that the federal government is treating this as a national-security threat, not merely a drug-regulatory matter”. The detail follows in a single sentence: “In particular, we would welcome the opportunity to understand what federal agencies know about foreign GLP-1 and peptide supply chains and their ties to entities involved in fentanyl production, what warning signs state attorneys general should be watching for, and how state and federal partners can better share information before this market gets further out of control”. So the four asks are: treat the supply as a security matter, brief the states on what federal agencies know, tell the states what warning signs to watch for, and improve state–federal information sharing.

Marshall’s own release put the sharper public ask on the record: “Our coalition is urging Secretary Rubio and the National Security Council to immediately establish greater oversight on the Green List program, or halt these potentially deadly ingredients from entering the country under the guise of helpful products” (Alabama AG, Sept. 18). That is the attorneys general’s public demand; the letter’s own closing offer is softer — “Our states stand ready to work with the Administration to protect our citizens, strengthen the drug supply, and prevent foreign bad actors from harming Americans”.

What the states did not ask for

Read the letter before repeating the second-hand summaries. It does not ask the Food and Drug Administration to take any specific action, and it does not seek a customs referral or an INTERPOL referral. The addressee is the Secretary of State and the NSC. The letter’s own framing pushes the FDA question aside: “This is not simply an FDA compliance issue. It implicates foreign chemical networks, illicit finance, customs enforcement, intelligence collection, state consumer protection, and the integrity of injectable medicines used by American citizens”. Customs enforcement appears in that list of what the problem implicates; it is not one of the four asks.

A separate item on the same day runs a different number at a different agency. A signed Washington Examiner op-ed by Jennifer Nunez refers in passing to thirty-four state attorneys general having asked the FDA to use its detention authority — a count and an addressee that this twenty-state letter does not share, and for which no primary document could be located for this piece. The two figures should not be merged.

The supply chain the letter describes

The mechanism under criticism is real and is on FDA’s own site. Import Alert 66-80, first titled “Detention Without Physical Examination of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 (GLP-1) Receptor Agonist Bulk Drug Substances”, establishes a Green List, which FDA defines on the alert as “the list of firm and drugs that have met the criteria for exclusion from recommendation for DWPE under this Import Alert (a.k.a. Green List”. The alert’s own page carries a published date of “Published Date: 08/21/2026”, which is a revision — FDA’s warning letter below dates the Green List’s implementation to September 2025. The letter’s criticism is blunt: “The FDA has created a new vulnerability in this already fragile supply chain by giving Chinese suppliers a green light to ship unapproved, knock-off product to America without detention or inspection”. Its account of how the list was stood up is consistent with FDA’s: “This was done through the creation of a Green List (FDA Import Alert 66-80), issued in September 2025”.

FDA’s warning letter to Harbin Jixianglong Biotech Co., Ltd. (Warning Letter 320-26-73) is the concrete instance behind the letter, and it is a regulator’s finding rather than a news summary. FDA inspected the Harbin, Heilongjiang facility from November 3 to 7, 2025. The firm had been added to the Green List on September 5, 2025 — the warning letter’s own dating of the list’s start: “on September 5, 2025, FDA implemented the Green List of Import Alert 66-80 to help address GLP-1 API drugs offered for import into the United States that appear to be adulterated or misbranded”. FDA’s finding: “You then labeled the GLP-1 API as manufactured by your firm and shipped this batch to the United States, even though it was not manufactured by a facility on the green list”. The batch went out on August 23, 2025; after a teleconference, “you initiated a voluntary recall of the two semaglutide API batches distributed in the United States”; and “your firm was placed on Import Alert 66-40 Detention Without Physical Examination of Drugs From Firms Which Have Not Met Drug GMPs and removed from the Green List”. The letter’s summary of the same case is one sentence: “after an on-site inspection months after Harbin’s Green List placement found that Harbin had purchased knock-off semaglutide API from a non-Green List facility that isn’t registered with the FDA, repackaged and relabeled it under Harbin’s name, changed manufacturing and retest dates, and distributed the API to the United States”.

The supplier-side scale comes from the alert rather than from the coverage: “FDA has conducted both onsite inspections and remote regulatory assessments of 48 GLP-1 API sites”, and “Of the 48 GLP-1 API sites FDA evaluated, it found that 21% were noncompliant under section 501 of the FD&C Act”. On the other end of the chain, the letter quotes the White House: “The White House has noted that only about 10 percent of APIs by volume for finished drug products used in the United States are made domestically”, against a policy the states endorse rather than attack — “The President’s August 2025 Executive Order on the Strategic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Reserve rightly recognizes that active pharmaceutical ingredients are not merely a health-care input, but a strategic national-security vulnerability”.

On fentanyl, the letter’s language is a concern, not a finding, and it should stay that way: “Not only are these knock-off drugs bypassing our nation’s safeguards, but there are also concerns of potential ties to Chinese entities manufacturing fentanyl”. The letter cites reporting rather than asserting the link itself — “Axios reported that Chinese manufacturers associated with fentanyl precursor supply chains are finding a new U.S. market in peptides, including cosmetic and weight-loss peptides, with blockchain-analysis firms identifying crypto-linked payments from U.S. peptide sales flowing to China-based chemical manufacturers” — and it asks the NSC a question it does not answer, framing the whole issue as one where “Our reliance on China, in particular, for medicines is a longstanding concern that must be rectified”.

What a counterfeit GLP-1 is in practice

Two different things are documented here, and the difference matters. FDA’s warning letter documents relabeled semaglutide API — bulk ingredient whose stated manufacturer was wrong — not a finished counterfeit pen. The step from that to a counterfeit GLP-1 product in a patient’s hands is the states’ inference about where the supply leads, not an FDA finding. The letter’s own description of why the mechanism worries them is that “the breach was caught by inspection, not by the Green List’s border safeguards”, and that “a Green List can quickly become a laundering channel rather than a safeguard” because “our ability to catch it currently depends on facility inspections after the fact, not real-time verification at the border”.

What a regulator treats as the risk, in FDA’s own words on the alert, is appearance rather than proof: under this alert, “foreign-sourced GLP-1 APIs should be considered for detention without physical examination (DWPE) based on the appearance of adulteration. Adulteration puts the safety of the American public at risk”. That is the practical definition of the problem — an unapproved foreign ingredient that reaches a US market under paperwork that does not name its real source.

The pattern the letter reaches back to is not a single company: “This follows the same pattern as the Heparin crisis nearly 20 years ago that killed or harmed”.

For the drug most often named in this cluster, the regulatory position is unambiguous — the letter footnotes that “Retatrutide is currently in Phase 3 clinical trials and has not yet been approved by the FDA” — and the Examiner op-ed states the legal consequence plainly: “Selling retatrutide violates the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and no doctor can legally prescribe it”. The same piece reports the manufacturer-side response, that “the manufacturer of the drug has taken matters into its own hands by identifying more than 14,000 marketing listings for retatrutide across more than 100 countries”. That count is the op-ed’s, and the piece is an authored opinion rather than an agency release.

For the product-level version of this question — what laboratory testing has actually found in gray-market vials, and what a forged retatrutide listing looks like — see our counterfeit retatrutide field guide and our reporting on TGA’s September 2026 laboratory result and the gray-market lab-testing report.

What a patient should do

Nothing in this story changes the patient-facing answer, and this article gives no dosing, vendor, or sourcing guidance by design. Prescription medicines should come from a licensed pharmacy. Where a specific product’s origin or approval status cannot be resolved — a vial whose stated manufacturer does not appear on the regulator’s lists, a listing selling a drug that is not approved for any use — the unresolved product question goes to FDA MedWatch, the agency’s adverse-event and product-problem reporting program. Anyone who has already taken an unapproved injectable and is unwell should treat it as a clinical matter and contact a licensed healthcare provider rather than a forum.

For where the law stands on the compound most often at issue, see our retatrutide legality and risk explainer; for the compounding-specific rules, the 503B compounding safety page.

What is not known yet

As of Sept. 19, 2026, no response to the letter appears on FDA’s own press-announcement index, which was current through Sept. 17, 2026. That is a statement about one surface, not about the agency’s conduct: the State Department’s press page returned HTTP 407 to fetch attempts from this desk, so the reply on that side is genuinely unchecked. A reply may also exist without a press release.

Two things are worth keeping separate from this story. The Washington Examiner’s Sept. 18 piece is a signed op-ed about retatrutide and teenagers — its retatrutide-specific claims are attributable to its author, and we cover the teen framing on our teen peptide pressure page. MarketWatch’s opinion piece the same day (syndicated through Dow Jones) concerns the FDA’s pending decision on reclassifying six peptides; that is a rulemaking argument, not this letter’s ask.

Frequently asked questions

Are counterfeit GLP-1 drugs coming from China?

That is what the twenty attorneys general say, in their own document: the letter describes “Chinese-sourced active pharmaceutical ingredients used in compounded GLP-1 drugs, including semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide”, and the Iowa release restates it as “The Chinese-sourced active pharmaceutical ingredients used in counterfeit GLP-1 drugs include semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide”. The documented case behind the concern is not a seized consumer product but an ingredient case: FDA found that Harbin Jixianglong Biotech relabeled semaglutide API bought from a facility not on the Green List and shipped it to the United States under its own name. Whether fentanyl-linked suppliers are inside the GLP-1 supply is a question the letter asks the National Security Council; it uses the words “concerns of potential ties”, and no source reviewed for this piece establishes it as fact.

How do I know if my GLP-1 is counterfeit?

You generally cannot verify a product’s true manufacturer or country of origin from the vial, the cartridge, or the listing that sold it, which is the whole problem the Import Alert 66-80 mechanism exists to address — FDA directs that “foreign-sourced GLP-1 APIs should be considered for detention without physical examination (DWPE) based on the appearance of adulteration. Adulteration puts the safety of the American public at risk”. The concrete warning signs documented by regulators are structural: an ingredient relabeled under a manufacturer that did not make it, as in the Harbin warning letter, and products for a drug that has no approval at all, such as retatrutide. Prescriptions should come from a licensed pharmacy, and a specific product concern — an unexplained label, a product whose stated manufacturer cannot be matched to the regulator’s lists, a suspected counterfeit — belongs with FDA MedWatch rather than with the seller.

Is my peptide a scam?

Is my peptide a scam is the right question to ask before, not after, and the answer depends on a document rather than on a vendor’s website. Two failure modes are documented in this cluster. First, source substitution: FDA’s warning letter records bulk semaglutide API relabeled under a different manufacturer’s name and shipped to the United States from a facility that was not on the approved list. Second, approval status: retatrutide is in Phase 3 trials and, as the letter footnotes, “has not yet been approved by the FDA”, so a listing selling it as a finished weight-loss product is selling an unapproved drug — a Washington Examiner op-ed states the legal position as “Selling retatrutide violates the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and no doctor can legally prescribe it”. The consumer-side test is not proof of authenticity but of verifiability: can the product’s manufacturer and approval status be confirmed against a regulator’s own records, and did the prescription come from a licensed pharmacy? If not, report it to FDA MedWatch. This article gives no dosing, sourcing, or vendor advice.

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