A fatal cat disease was finally cured, but the treatment wasn’t legally available. So a group of cat lovers created an international black market.
In 2023, Marlena Arjo adopted a one-eyed kitten with a penchant for destruction. She named him Otto, and over the next eight months, Otto grew into his own little chaotic personality.
“ He’s laying on houseplants, he’s tearing books out of the bookshelves, ripping the calendar off the wall…I wasn’t prepared for having a criminal in my home,” Arjo joked.
Within months, Otto got sick and stopped eating. Arjo rushed him to a vet and learned he had feline infectious peritonitis, better known as FIP, a disease that kills nearly all cats that contract it.
The vet said there was nothing the clinic could do. But there was something Arjo could do.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Arjo recalled the vet telling her. “But by the way, you can get drugs for this if you go to this Facebook group.”
This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Hyperfixed podcast, we tell the story of the cat drug black market, why it was even necessary, and how cat lovers fought for big changes to make the black market obsolete.
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Listen: The Cat Drug Black Market parts 1, 2, and 3 (Hyperfixed)
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Credits
Reporters and editors: Emma Courtland, Sari Soffer Sukenik, Amor Yates, and Alex Goldman | Producer: Sari Soffer Sukenik | Editor: Kate Howard | Fact checkers: Artis Curiskis and Naomi Barr | General counsel: Victoria Barenetsky | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Score and sound design: Alex Goldman, Breakmaster Cylinder, Jim Briggs, and Fernando Arruda | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson
Support for Reveal is provided by Reveal listeners, and by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Back in the summer of 2023, Marlena Arjo made the huge mistake of stopping by a kitten adoption event at a local pet store on her birthday. |
| Marlena Arjo: | I wanted to look at kittens, but I wasn’t, of course, going to get one. Then, I went in and there was a tiny little kitten who had just had his eye removed, so he had purple stitches over one side of his face, and he was way younger than the rest. I was so sad that I blacked out and came to with a cat in a box in my car. |
| Al Letson: | She brought that cat back to her home in Portland, Oregon. She named him Otto, and over the next eight months, Otto grew into his own little chaotic personality. |
| Marlena Arjo: | He’s laying on house plants. He’s tearing books out of the bookshelves, ripping the calendar off the wall. I wasn’t prepared for having a criminal in my home. |
| Al Letson: | Things started to change around February 2024. At first, all Marlena noticed was that Otto didn’t seem as energetic or playful as he usually is. Then he stopped eating his regular food, and then he stopped eating treats. Then, things got a little scary. |
| Marlena Arjo: | It was early morning on a Saturday. I was sitting on my bed, I don’t know, on my phone or something maybe, and Otto jumped on the bed and then looked at me for a second. Then, kind of twisted his head over to one side and got kind of stuck like that for a second. |
| Al Letson: | She scooped Otto up and rushed him to the emergency vet where they immediately recognized the seriousness of the situation. They ran a series of tests, kept him there for six or seven hours, and ultimately sent Marlena home with her sick little kitten. When the vet called at 11:00 PM on a Sunday night, there was urgent news to share. Marlena’s cat was suffering from feline infectious peritonitis, which is better known by its acronym FIP. FIP is a viral disease, most commonly found in cats under two years old. It often spreads through shared litter boxes and then wreaks havoc on their bodies. It’s fatal. |
| Marlena Arjo: | It just kind of destroys all their organs at once. Their stomachs fill with fluids, their lungs get little nodules. It’s like a bunch of really messed up stuff, and within a month usually they have to be put down. It is devastating, and I remember feeling really bad that I hadn’t gotten him a stocking for Christmas and I was like, “Oh my God, he’s not going to live to another Christmas. I didn’t even get him a stocking.” That was my first instinct for some reason. |
| Al Letson: | From there, things start to get a little weird because right before the vet hangs up the phone, she tells Marlena this one other thing. |
| Marlena Arjo: | She’s like, “Yeah, I shouldn’t tell you this, but by the way, you can get drugs for this if you go to this Facebook group.” |
| Al Letson: | Marlena is shocked and pretty confused. Did her vet just recommend black market cat drugs from a Facebook group? Before Marlena has time to think about how bizarre this all is, she looks over at poor Otto, who’s gotten skinnier and weaker each day, and she logs onto Facebook. |
| Marlena Arjo: | I go to the Facebook group and it’s very weird. It’s a private group, and once you join, there’s a set of rules. It says, “Post anonymous post about how sad you are for your cat, but do not mention drugs. Do not talk about treatment. Don’t say anything about that. Just say that your pet got diagnosed and how sad you are.” I post an anonymous post about my cat, and immediately get all these responses like crying emojis, “We’re so sorry,” and then I get a DM from an admin or something that first of all is like, “Send me a picture of your cat’s eyes.” I was like, “Okay, he’s got one, but I can send the one eye.” They’re like, “What did he get diagnosed? How old is he? What are the symptoms?” All this stuff. |
| Al Letson: | The next thing she knew, she was ordering cat drugs from a random website, and the very next day she found an unmarked package on her doorstep with vials of a mysterious liquid and instructions for how to inject them into her cat. Over the next three months, Marlena says she spent thousands of dollars via PayPal to order more and more of this liquid, but the weirdest part was that this black market drug, it actually cured her cat. |
| Marlena Arjo: | Within the first week, he was back to normal. |
| Al Letson: | A year later, Marlena still couldn’t stop thinking about this whole ordeal, and so she reached out to the team at Hyperfixed, a podcast where they try to answer listeners’ questions no matter how big or small, and Marlena had a lot of questions for them. |
| Marlena Arjo: | I want to know who these people are. Are they vets? Are they cat experts? How did they get involved in this in the first place? How did they start? |
| Al Letson: | What she wanted to know was why any of this cloak-and-dagger stuff was necessary in order to get the drug that could cure her cat. The Hyperfixed team set out to find answers and quickly realized that what they thought was a rabbit hole was actually a massive network of tunnels spanning across continents and currencies. It had its own cultures, its own rules, and its own hierarchies. Today, we’re teaming up with the Hyperfixed Podcast and its host, Alex Goldman, to go deep on what they uncovered. |
| Alex Goldman: | When Marlena first came to us, she was looking for any information about what had happened to her a year earlier, and we found that the answer to that begins with the story of this guy. The only question I have for you at the beginning is how do I pronounce your name? |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | Niels Pedersen. |
| Alex Goldman: | Oh, exactly like it looks. Great. Today, Dr. Niels Pedersen is 82 years old. He’s a Professor Emeritus of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis, and he’s widely considered to be one of the real rockstars in the field of small animal pathology. This man has written dozens of influential articles on the subject. He’s authored two classic textbooks, and while there’s no way to say for sure how many cats have been saved by his work, it’s easily hundreds of thousands, and yet it’s possible he never would have accomplished any of that stuff were it not for the fact that the year he started studying veterinary science was 1963. |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | In 1963, there was some rumble about this new disease that suddenly appeared in cats. |
| Alex Goldman: | The disease being rumbled about was FIP. Earlier that year, it had first been identified by a researcher in Boston, and suddenly all these other researchers were beginning to find it in other parts of the country. They knew that it typically caused an intense inflammation in the lining of the abdomen, that’s why they called it peritonitis, and that it killed 100% of the cats that developed it, but nobody actually knew what this thing was or where it came from. |
| Now, Dr. Pedersen grew up on a poultry farm, and stray cats were just a fixture throughout his childhood, and they quickly became his favorite animal, so when he heard there was a chance to join the labs at UC Davis, working to potentially save cats from this fatal feline disease, he wasted no time. By 1969. He’d co-authored one of the earliest studies on FIP, which paved the way for another UC Davis student to make the discovery that would become the foundation of Dr. Pedersen’s own research for the next five decades, and that discovery was- | |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | Feline infectious peritonitis is caused by a coronavirus. |
| Alex Goldman: | Now, feline coronavirus is actually kind of no big deal. At worst, it causes mild diarrhea, so Dr. Pedersen knew there had to be something transforming this benign coronavirus into this other deadly thing. In the mid ’90s, he had a breakthrough. Dr. Pedersen and his team discovered that FIP is a mutation happening inside the bodies of about 20% of cats. Most were able to fight it off, but if the cat had a compromised immune system, perhaps an eye infection so severe they end up losing their eye, like Marlena’s cat, Otto, those cats might not be able to fight it off. From there, the virus would replicate so aggressively it would become impossible to stop. Realizing that gave Dr. Pedersen an idea. |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | Ultimately, I realized that maybe antiviral drugs were the way to go. |
| Alex Goldman: | By the early 2000s, there were no antivirals that had been tailored to treat coronaviruses. However, there were some companies working on antiviral treatments for other RNA viruses, and one of the companies doing that was Gilead Sciences. Dr. Pedersen reached out to this guy he knew at Gilead. I don’t know why I called him this guy. He was the chief executive at the company, but anyway, Dr. Pedersen reached out to this guy and he told him he thought some of the antivirals they were researching might be helpful for treating this feline coronavirus he was studying. The guy was like, “Have at it. We’ll send some right over.” |
| Dr. Pedersen tested the compounds on feline tissue cultures and what he found was amazing. There was not one, but two different Gilead compounds that seemed to be blocking the growth of the coronaviruses in the tissue samples. In the end, Dr. Pedersen chose to move forward with one of these compounds, the parent compound known as GS441524. The GS stands for Gilead Sciences. It was the same weird liquid that saved the life of Marlena’s cat, Otto. In 2018, after decades of research, Dr. Pedersen had finally identified a treatment that worked, and it worked phenomenally well. | |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | We found that we could cure 90% or more of cats that had feline infectious peritonitis, which up to that time was a hundred percent fatal disease virtually. |
| Alex Goldman: | He published a paper in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery in 2019, and suddenly a world where no cats have to die from FIP seemed not only possible, but imminently within reach. The only hurdle left to clear was FDA approval. Very briefly, how long were you developing this drug before you went to the FDA? |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | We didn’t go to the FDA. |
| Alex Goldman: | Oh. |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | We did not go to the FDA because we were unable to obtain the rights for GS. |
| Alex Goldman: | That is because just months after Dr. Pedersen and the UC Davis research team published their 2019 paper announcing the discovery of this life-saving cat drug, the pharmaceutical company that owns the rights to that drug was beginning to turn its attention elsewhere. |
| Speaker 5: | As of today, we have 15 cases of COVID-19 that have been detected in the United States. |
| President Donal…: | The World Health Organization officially announced that this is a global pandemic. |
| Speaker 7: | Nearly a quarter of a million deaths and tens of millions on unemployment. |
| Alex Goldman: | COVID-19 was spreading rapidly, and because there were no real treatment options, it was killing thousands, then millions of people who became infected with it. Lockdown orders were put in place, supply chains started breaking down, and the global economy was under imminent threat, so whoever created the first treatment option stood to make billions of dollars in government contracts. The one company with a compound that had just proven its ability to fight coronaviruses was Gilead. |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | At first, we thought, “Well, that’s great because we can use the active ingredient possibly to treat cats. Then, they can use their altered form of the active ingredients to treat humans.” |
| Alex Goldman: | Dr. Pedersen says Gilead didn’t see things that way. They worried that any attempt to get FDA approval of GS could potentially endanger their ability to get FDA approval of its human counterpart. |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | They were very adamant. They said, “No, we can’t do it because there’s a huge need in the human side and that’s our interest. We don’t have a veterinary arm. We’re a human company and that’s where we’re going to stay in.” |
| Alex Goldman: | In October of 2020, the FDA gave full approval for the first ever treatment of COVID-19, the Gilead antiviral, now widely known as remdesivir. By the end of 2020, remdesivir generated $2.8 billion in revenue and was estimated to cut COVID recovery time by nearly a third, but as for its cat-saving cousin, GS441524, it seemed like the issue was dead in the water. There would be no FDA approval, and without that, it would be as if the treatment didn’t exist. |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | Well, it was totally frustrating to me. I’d worked my whole life on feline infectious peritonitis, and finally having in my hand the ability to cure 90-some percent of these cases, yeah, it was frustrating as hell. |
| Alex Goldman: | We reached out to Gilead about their decision not to move forward with the cat drug, and they said they’re open to exploring a version of the drug for cats. They just haven’t found the right partner. They also pointed out that they’ve supported academic research into solutions for FIP. Still, all of this left a lot of uncertainty within the vet community. Gilead’s patent on GS doesn’t run out until 2029, so until then, were cats just going to continue dying from this totally curable disease? Well, that’s not how things turned out. As you already know from our listener, Marlena, this life-saving cat drug did end up finding its way into the world, just not in the way Dr. Pedersen had hoped. |
| Dr. Niels Peder…: | I gave talks at international meetings, and in the audience where these Chinese veterinarians who were taking pictures like crazy of every slide on hand and everything. They took all this information back and somebody in China saw a potential market for this and proceeded, so then what happened was almost predictable. |
| Al Letson: | What happened next was the emergence of a sprawling international black market for treating FIP, led by a group of renegade cat lovers, who along the way got in a little bit over their heads. |
| Speaker 8: | That’s when we sat down and we were like, “How is this happening? What is this doing? I mean, we’re funding this lifestyle. What in the world are we doing?” |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Before the break, the team at the Hyperfixed podcast brought us the story of a miraculous treatment for the fatal cat disease FIP, except this wonder drug wasn’t legally available, because it never got FDA approval, but it was widely available on the black market. That’s how hundreds of thousands of cats had gotten cured, thanks in part to a New York-based cat lady named Robin Kintz. |
| Robin Kintz: | I’m currently topped out at eight. And in the world of crazy cat people, that’s actually not a lot, as they will tell you. But I also have a husband who is allergic and asthmatic. So we’re holding steady at eight. |
| Al Letson: | Robin’s story starts with two sick cats, Henry and Fiona, who contracted FIP in late 2018. |
| Robin Kintz: | I had gone online to look for information, answers, help, support, and found very little other than the fact that Dr. Niels Pedersen had at that point already discovered the antiviral that treats and cures FIP. |
| Al Letson: | So Robin turns to the few Facebook support groups she could find. From there, she gets a message from two women who say, “Hey, actually, we’ve been treating our cats, and we know where to get the drug known as GS.” They were ordering it from China, where drug companies had gotten ahold of the formula for a promising treatment and were seemingly manufacturing it for research purposes only. |
| Since it’s not legal in the U.S., vets could not prescribe the drug without risking their medical licenses. But Robin is not a vet. Her background is mostly in marketing and graphic design. So she takes the risk. Through encrypted messages and translation apps, Robin is introduced to one of the drugmakers in China. She transfers them hundreds of dollars. They send liquid vials of GS directly to her doorstep. And of the two cats she treated, one of them is still alive today. | |
| Robin Kintz: | Sadly, Henry did not survive. He was on treatment for a year and then succumbed, but his sister, Fiona, is still with me and raising hell. She’s been cured for six years. |
| Al Letson: | For a disease that Robin was told was a death sentence, even this partial win felt like a total miracle. It didn’t matter that this treatment came from a random lab in China, or that it was more than $300 for a single vial that might only last a week, or that it might have totally backfired and killed her cats even faster at a time when things seemed hopeless. |
| This black-market drug had given her cats a chance, and that was something she thought other cats deserve too. So she founded her own Facebook group to create the infrastructure to get these drugs into more people’s hands. She called it FIP Warriors. Hyperfixed host Alex Goldman continues the story. | |
| Alex Goldman: | Robin Kintz told us that in the beginning, there was really nothing formal about the FIP Warriors Facebook group that she founded. It was basically just a handful of cat lovers. |
| Robin Kintz: | I would say probably three other people when it first started. And then within a few months, it really grew, because there had been nothing else of this ilk in the cat community or in the FIP community. |
| Alex Goldman: | But these early adopters quickly realized that the learning curve was much steeper than they might have thought. It wasn’t just about securing these lifesaving cat drugs from China. They also had to figure out how to use these drugs, because remember, this disease had been incurable. And as far as the medical community was concerned, it still was. So there was a lot of trial and error and a lot of fumbling around in the dark. |
| Robin Kintz: | We were kind of figuring things out as we went. |
| Alex Goldman: | But they were getting people these treatments, and cats were being cured. And while that seemed like a wonderfully miraculous feat, it also brought its own risks, because it’s one thing to get your own black-market drugs from China, but getting black-market drugs from China with the intent to distribute them, potentially to thousands of people, well, that starts to look a lot like drug trafficking. |
| And in the United States, that’s illegal, even when the drugs are for a cat, even when you’re trying to save your cat from certain death and there are no legal treatment options available. So the FIP Warriors orchestrated their operation so that transactions were never happening in public spaces. So can you just explain really quickly the structure of FIP Warriors? If I have a cat and my cat is diagnosed with FIP and I come to you, what happens? How does it work? | |
| Robin Kintz: | You answer a few questions to be admitted into the Facebook group. And then once you’re admitted into the group, if you have a sick cat, you’re encouraged to make a quick post on the page saying, “I have a sick cat. Can someone please reach out to help me?” |
| Alex Goldman: | The thing you cannot mention is drugs. In fact, you can’t mention treatment in any way. But after you’ve written your post, a group moderator will reach out. |
| Robin Kintz: | And what we’ll do is ask a whole bunch for intake information that will tell us a lot about your cat, symptoms. We look at blood work, how much you’ve been able to get done through vet visits. |
| Alex Goldman: | From there, FIP Warriors assigns you a care team that presents you with options for suppliers. You place your order, and the meds get shipped to your home, sometimes in just 24 hours. And for the next three months, your treatment is overseen by the admin of your care team. |
| Robin Kintz: | At that point, if the cat’s doing well, it’s considered cured. |
| Alex Goldman: | With each new cured cat, GS felt more and more like a miracle drug. And because of that, word spread, especially in circles where FIP is the most prevalent, like cat rescues and breeding operations. |
| Erin Boyle: | I had heard that there was a treatment available and that it was kind of like shady and black market, but I had no idea how to get it. |
| Alex Goldman: | This is Erin Boyle. She’s a veterinary technician in Texas. And in 2019, when she asked her colleagues where she might find this miracle drug, someone sent her a link to FIP Warriors. |
| Erin Boyle: | I was contacted probably within 24 hours by two separate admins who offered to get the medication to me overnight. |
| Alex Goldman: | Erin was stunned, and she knew she wanted to help get this drug to as many cats as possible. So she started volunteering her time, offering up tidbits of information she’d learned from working in veterinary offices. Soon, she became an admin. |
| Erin Boyle: | It started off, I didn’t feel real confident in what I was doing, but I learned through asking other admins. And obviously, with experience, we learned how to best manage these cases and how to get them the medications and the treatment goals and all of that. |
| Alex Goldman: | And as more and more pet owners were hearing about what the FIP Warriors were up to, word started making its way back to the veterinary community. |
| Dr Bruce Kornre…: | The thing that really changed me is I have a good friend who had a cat that had FIP, and she went through the full 84 days of injectable compound. |
| Alex Goldman: | This is Dr. Bruce Kornreich. He’s the director of the Cornell Feline Health Center. And he told us that when he first started hearing that people were treating their cats with black-market drugs from China, he was very much like, “But you have no idea what’s actually in these drugs.” |
| Dr Bruce Kornre…: | Interestingly, in her case, I knew, for example, that she got a vial one time during the therapy, and she noticed some precipitate or something floating around in this clear liquid, and she was concerned. So she contacted the source. If it was illegitimate, they probably would never have gotten back to her. |
| Alex Goldman: | Right. |
| Dr Bruce Kornre…: | They spoke to her for 45 minutes on the phone on a Saturday and ultimately sent her new compounds. And this cat that would have almost certainly passed away survived, and this was three years ago, and the cat is doing well. So this to me was like, “Whoa.” |
| Alex Goldman: | Vets around the country were hearing these types of stories, even as they were watching their own cat patients die. And so, they felt compelled to share the secret. |
| Dr Bruce Kornre…: | So basically, what started to happen is they would let people know that this was available, but they couldn’t really help with the administration of the drug. |
| Alex Goldman: | Remember, a vet could lose their license if they administer or even recommend an illegal drug. So instead, they just started letting people know that this existed, in whispers. Robin, the FIP Warriors founder, told us that she has files full of paperwork where you can see in writing that veterinarians are referring their patients to FIP Warriors for treatment details. And once those vets started recommending a path to getting this drug, the group just exploded. |
| Robin Kintz: | Through the help of many amazing volunteers, we’ve gotten to the point where we are now where we have the process in place for intake and assigning to teams and finding emergency meds. We have 50 different state chats specifically for that purpose. But yeah, it’s been a process. |
| Alex Goldman: | With their new system in place, the group settled into what seemed like a pretty sustainable routine. But over the course of 2019 and 2020, they faced a series of challenges that would force them to confront the unavoidable risks of dealing with a black-market drug. First, COVID hit and shut everything down, then it started getting really hard to get the meds out of China, and one of the brands they’d been using since the beginning suddenly stopped working. |
| Robin Kintz: | It turned out that it was not effective, and cats did die, and it was absolutely awful. |
| Alex Goldman: | Now, it’s worth reminding you that without treatment, cats with FIP will die, pretty fast, and that’s essentially what was happening here. The treatment they’d relied on for months at this point didn’t do anything. Of course, it felt like there was nothing anybody could really do about it. These black-market drugs were being made by random people on the other side of the planet, but the FIP Warriors pivoted. |
| Robin says that they found new manufacturers and verified their quality by running field trials and using independent testing, and she says they negotiated with manufacturers to bring down prices across the board. Vials that once cost hundreds of dollars were eventually half that, sometimes a quarter, being negotiated mostly by women who had little to no background in pharmaceuticals, let alone international drug deals. It was an insane amount of work from top to bottom. Here’s Erin again. | |
| Erin Boyle: | All my free time pretty much was taken up trying to save cats, and it’s very stressful, because a lot of these cats were actively dying when the owners contact you. So the faster I can get them the meds, the more likely they are to survive. So it was starting to get me in trouble at work, because I was looking at my phone too much. I would try to do it in the bathroom and my lunch break and stuff like that, because I just didn’t want to think, “Oh, well, if I responded sooner, maybe this cat would still be alive.” |
| Alex Goldman: | It was quickly becoming clear just how much of a commitment it was to volunteer for this group. But the thing is, it wasn’t exactly volunteering, not for some people at least. |
| Celeste Park-Es…: | So I became an admin in probably end of spring 2020. |
| Alex Goldman: | This is Celeste Park-Estes. She runs a cat rescue in Utah and joined FIP Warriors about a year after it began. |
| Celeste Park-Es…: | Later on that year, we had a new brand that came out. And it was mentioned to me that if I wanted to, I could sell it, and I was like, “What do you mean by sell it?” And Robin was like, “Oh, you could carry it and sell it. That’s what we do here.” And the thing that made it kind of exciting for me is because my rescue was not very big, and we were spending a lot on treating these FIP cats. |
| The more FIP that we got, the harder it became, and I was like, “Well, this would be exciting, because if I sold it, I could basically fund my FIP treatment this way. I could actually take in more FIP cats that way.” And that’s what we ended up doing. So I would sell them for $40 a vial, and I think it might have been 60 when it first started, and then I would turn around and wire back all but $10 worth of what the vials cost. | |
| Alex Goldman: | I should say that not every admin in the group was involved in this system. Some of them, like the admin Erin we spoke to, didn’t want to have anything to do with shipping. But the admins were generally aware that some money was being made, and the reason that they knew that was because as soon as they signed up to become an admin, they’d be given a rate sheet that clearly showed the cost to the pet parent was different from the cost to the admin, and the difference in those two prices was this commission fee, which was going to the admin that shipped the medication. |
| Now, in Celeste’s case, that markup wasn’t a lot. And like Celeste said, a lot of that money was going right back into her rescue work. And even if it wasn’t, these people were doing a ridiculous amount of work. The problem was, according to some pet parents, this compensation structure generally wasn’t being disclosed to them. In fact, on the group’s Facebook page, it very explicitly said, quote, “We do not make any money or otherwise receive any profit or incentives from this group.” | |
| The other problem, besides this lack of disclosure, was that this obviously just creates a massive conflict of interest. Ultimately, Celeste and some of the other admins said that while they raised concerns, they didn’t want to cause any real problems. In the end, they cared more about helping cats. They estimate that their work has saved the lives of some 250,000 cats. But cracks had been forming since the start of this organization. And in July of 2022, a huge scandal hit the group. We spoke to a half dozen former and current FIP Warriors admins for this story, and most could tell us exactly where they were the moment the news broke. | |
| Erin Boyle: | Oh, I do. I remember it very well, because I was at work, and I was in the exam room with a veterinarian at the time, and a text came through on my smartwatch, and I think I went white. |
| Celeste Park-Es…: | We get a message saying Nicole Randall has been raided. |
| Alex Goldman: | Nicole Randall was one of the admins based in Texas. She’d been with the FIP Warriors since 2019, the same year Robin Kintz founded the group. And she’d become pretty well-known in the community, not just because she’d been around so long, but because she’d come to serve a critical role in the way this network was able to function. |
| You see, even though the FIP Warriors had a whole list of approved brands and medications, many of the admins in this group kept only one or two of those brands stocked in their homes. So if a pet parent wanted a brand of medication that their admin wasn’t stocking, the admin could turn to someone who stocked a lot more of the medication. | |
| Nicole Randall was one of those people. And in the ecosystem of the FIP Warriors, she functioned like a regional hub for shipping these medications from China to parents in different parts of the U.S. So in July 2022, when word got out that FDA inspectors had raided Nicole Randall’s home in Cedar Park, Texas, the Warrior admins started freaking out. | |
| Celeste Park-Es…: | I’m like, “Am I going to be caught up in this?” Because she was shipping 15 other brands for me. |
| Erin Boyle: | For all we knew, everybody was going to get raided. She could have been the first, and everybody else was next. We had no way of knowing where this was going to stop. |
| Alex Goldman: | Meanwhile, details of the investigation into Nicole Randall began to leak, and those details shocked even those who thought they were on the inside at FIP Warriors. |
| Speaker 7: | The multimillion-dollar scheme defrauded cat owners nationwide over the course of several years. |
| Alex Goldman: | Hyperfixed producer Sari Soffer Sukenik pored over the investigation documents to learn all that she could. And Sari, what did you find? |
| Sari Soffer Suk…: | Hey, Alex. So I learned from the case filings that it all started in February 2021 when Customs and Border Protection intercepted a package from Hong Kong, and that package contained boxes labeled facial masks. |
| Alex Goldman: | Okay. What was actually in those boxes? |
| Sari Soffer Suk…: | Glad you asked. They were actually filled with dozens of unmarked liquid vials and pink foil packets with mystery pills. Lab tests ended up revealing that the liquid wasn’t skincare. It was GS-441524. |
| Alex Goldman: | Jeez. Okay. |
| Sari Soffer Suk…: | Yeah. So Customs then notified an FDA agent who learned that the package recipient was a moderator of a Facebook group called FIP Warriors. So the agent went undercover. She reached out to the group with a picture of a cat. Now, this cat had just been to the vet and gotten a clean bill of health, but the FIP Warriors diagnosed it with FIP anyway. |
| Alex Goldman: | So even though the cat was fine, they took it upon themselves to misdiagnose it without being real veterinarians? |
| Sari Soffer Suk…: | Exactly. And because of that, the agent was then sent to Nicole Randall, the woman at the center of all of this, to get GS. That’s when the agency started digging deeper into Randall. The FDA discovered that in a two-year span, Randall received hundreds of packages from Hong Kong or China. She and those linked to her sent nearly 60,000 vials and more than 200,000 pills of GS to pet parents around the globe, and they found she was bringing in significant profits from each of those sales. |
| Alex Goldman: | How significant are we talking here? |
| Sari Soffer Suk…: | Brace yourself, because the investigation revealed Nicole Randall had sold more than $9.5 million of GS and made $4 million off the proceeds. |
| Alex Goldman: | Oh my God. She made $4 million off selling cat drugs? |
| Sari Soffer Suk…: | Yes. And with that, she purchased a Tesla and four additional homes. One of those homes, which she bought a few months before the raid, was valued at $2.8 million. Randall was ultimately charged with introducing an adulterated drug into interstate commerce, which is a felony that basically means that she was knowingly selling and shipping an unapproved, illegally manufactured drug across state lines. She eventually pleaded guilty to that charge and was put on a one-year probation, and had to give up all the assets she bought from the proceeds of her FIP Warriors sales. |
| Celeste Park-Es…: | That’s when we sat down and we were like, “How is this happening? What is this doing? I mean, we’re funding this lifestyle? What in the world are we doing?” |
| Alex Goldman: | Celeste felt betrayed by the Nicole Randall raid, not because she was shocked by the money. Of course she wasn’t. She’d sold vials herself, but it was the way that Nicole Randall had seemed to prioritize the money, putting profit before the cats. |
| Celeste Park-Es…: | If I went to court, if I was actually sent to court about it or whatever, I can guarantee you that I would have the court filled with people who were… They’re saying that I saved their animals, that I was there doing it for a moral reason and an ethical reason. Was I doing the legal right thing? No. But I was put in this situation because I had no other option, and that’s me. When we find out exactly what Nicole Randall had done, I don’t know that I could say the same thing about her, because you don’t go out trying to save cats and end up with $4 million. |
| Alex Goldman: | To the Warriors’ surprise, the investigation seemed to end with Nicole Randall. No one else heard from federal law enforcement. But Celeste began to wonder, was anyone else profiting in the same way? |
| Robin Kintz: | You have to bear in mind that without gray-area activities, there’s no way that the hundreds of thousands of cats that have been saved by the work of this group could have ever happened, ever. |
| Alex Goldman: | That again was Robin Kintz, the founder of FIP Warriors, and we’ve only been able to interview Robin once. She since stopped responding to our emails. But during that conversation, we were able to ask her about a number of the accusations that had been leveled against this group, including admins making huge profits off shipping these drugs. And generally speaking, she didn’t seem terribly concerned by them. |
| Robin Kintz: | Money was made in the past, varying degrees by various people, but there are inherent risks that people have taken in order to make this group function, in order to save cats despite the risks. So to the people that are worried about commissions and being ripped off, I say, “Look elsewhere for something to complain about. Is your cat alive?” |
| Alex Goldman: | In the aftermath of the Nicole Randall raid, leaders of the FIP Warriors group had started to turn on each other. There were some, like Celeste, who wanted to take profit out of the organization altogether. |
| Celeste Park-Es…: | It was like a wake-up call that we should never have been doing this in the first place. |
| Alex Goldman: | Then there were others, like a former admin named Marcia Illingworth, who thought that was a bit too precious. |
| Marcia Illingwo…: | It was kind of like all of a sudden, a bunch of people became born-again virgins, “Oh, no, we shouldn’t be making money off of this.” |
| Alex Goldman: | By the beginning of 2023, the group was at risk of collapsing entirely, and it wasn’t just the Nicole Randall raid. There’d been discoveries that certain drugs were proving less effective. Admins became skeptical about each other’s brand alliances and accused some of pushing certain brands for their own profit. |
| Others who quit their jobs to pursue Warriors full-time were accused of only being in it for the money. And one day, tensions just completely boiled over. In March of 2023, around half the admins and moderators defected from FIP Warriors, which left cat parents, some in the middle of treatment cycles, desperate for information. | |
| Al Letson: | In the aftermath of the raid, the FIP Warriors group split firmly in two. Eventually, Robin says the old group changed the way things were done, no longer shipping medication and taking profits. But the ones who left, they had bigger changes in mind. They wanted to make the whole cat drug black market obsolete. |
| Speaker 10: | We wanted to get treatment, something that you could obtain legally, under the guidance of a vet. |
| Al Letson: | That’s up next after the break. You’re listening to Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. A group of cat advocates known as the FIP Warriors built a system to save cats from an otherwise fatal disease called FIP. They distributed black market drugs that weren’t available legally in the US, but after one administrator was convicted of a felony after earning millions off her work with sick cats, there were pushes for change that splintered the group. Some members were kicked out, including Nicole Jacque, a longtime admin who left in 2023. She co-founded a new Facebook group wanting to find a legal path to treating sick cats, so these sorts of shady deals didn’t need to happen. |
| Nicole Jacque: | And really our goal was to, one, spread information about FIP treatment because there were still people who were, their cat would get diagnosed and their vet would say like, “Oh, nothing you can do. Euthanize them.” First, make information available. But two, the way we put it was try to put ourselves out of a job. We wanted to get treatment something that you could obtain legally under the guidance of a vet so that you didn’t need to come to a Facebook group like us. |
| Al Letson: | That’s where HyperFixed host Alex Goldman picks up the story as this new group fights to get these lifesaving cat drugs off the black market and into pharmacies. |
| Alex Goldman: | Long before Nicole Jacque started working with FIP Warriors, she spent years volunteering with her local cat rescue. Often, that meant assisting the veterinarian on duty. So during that time, she’d given a lot of cats a lot of meds. And while those meds were prescribed by veterinarians and obtained through legal channels, for the most part, they were not FDA approved. |
| Nicole Jacque: | All along, I’ve been sort of like, “This is so weird. Why are we stuck like this when we need other prescription medications for cats that aren’t coming from an FDA approved manufacturer?” |
| Alex Goldman: | Once Nicole left FIP Warriors, she made it her mission to get an answer. And when she turned to the pharmaceutical law books, she found what she was looking for, and it starts with the Animal Medicinal Drug Use Clarification Act of 1994. |
| About 30 years ago, the FDA realized they had a problem on their hands. According to federal laws, it was illegal to use FDA-approved drugs for animals in any manner that differed in any way from the drugs approved label. That meant that if you deviated from the dose, the duration, or the species the drug was meant to treat, you were in violation of the law. And obviously, this was a huge problem because there weren’t and aren’t a lot of drugs that have received FDA approval for the treatment of animals. | |
| Nicole Jacque: | It’s very expensive. It’s millions and millions of dollars to get a drug approved for one species, and we have all these species. There’s never going to be a drug for everything we need a drug for for every species. |
| Alex Goldman: | In 1994, this new law created a workaround for that issue. |
| Nicole Jacque: | They specifically have this guidance, which is if there is not an FDA approved drug available that you are allowed to compound it. |
| Alex Goldman: | You guys, you’re allowed to compound it. Don’t I sound really authoritative like I know what I’m talking about? I mean, okay, to be fair, I do know what I’m talking about now, but I had no idea what that meant when Nicole first mentioned it to me. And since I bet I’m not alone in that, here’s my little PSA on compounding. |
| There are two types of pharmacies, compounding and non-compounding. Non-compounding pharmacies are the kind that most of us go to, like a CVS or a Walgreens. These pharmacies just generally dispense pre-made medication. That’s where compounding pharmacies are different. Compounding pharmacies either alter the drugs or work with their active ingredients to make new forms of those medications. | |
| Nicole Jacque: | For example, gabapentin. There’s FDA approved gabapentin. We use it a lot in veterinary medicine, but mostly it’s all kind of packaged in a way that it’s dosed for humans, like the doses are too huge or they’re not in a form that you’re going to be able to give to your dog or cat. A lot of times vets will prescribe a compounded version of it like a liquid oral suspension, chews, sometimes a transdermal sort of thing. |
| Alex Goldman: | These compounding pharmacies turn the drug ingredients into doses of medication that are appropriate for your specific animal species and in a form that can be easily administered. And according to this 1994 law, as long as everything that goes into those drugs is FDA approved, those medications are totally legal. But what about animal drugs made from ingredients that are not approved by the FDA, like the one that Dr. Peterson studied and the FIP warriors were relying on GS441524? |
| There was mounting pressure on the FDA to allow drugs to be compounded from bulk substances, as in the raw active ingredients. In April of 2022, just a handful of months before the Nicole Randall raid, and while FIP Warriors was still operating at its peak, the FDA released a new guideline for the veterinary industry. And a lot of these guidelines are written in legalese, but this one seems to be saying like, “Hey, we know that there are situations out there where there’s no FDA approved treatment option and no FDA approved drug can be used as the source of an active ingredient for compounding, so in those cases, we acknowledge that it may be medically necessary to compound a treatment from those ‘bulk drug substances’. And although those medications still won’t technically be legal, we are explicitly giving our permission to do this.” | |
| Here’s Nicole in 2023, fully immersed in the world of pharmaceutical law after years of operating in a black market that was filled with profiteering and unreliable meds. And she’s reading about this new guideline and she’s thinking, “Maybe this is how we dig ourselves out of this dark and unsavory hole we’ve been operating in.” | |
| Nicole Jacque: | And then I reached out to a contact in the FDA who was in their pharmacy enforcement division and I’m like, “Look, am I crazy or shouldn’t we just be able to do this?” And basically they looked at me and they’re like, “Yeah, duh, that’s why this is there.” |
| Alex Goldman: | You don’t really need to go to anybody and be like, “Hey, I’m looking for approval here.” |
| Nicole Jacque: | They were basically like, “You don’t need to be approved for this. You do it. You get a pharmacy to do it.” And I was like, “Oh, hmm.” |
| Alex Goldman: | So that’s what Nicole did. She put together a pitch, picked a major compounding pharmacy and then said to them, “Hey, will you compound this for me?” And they were like, “Yeah, sure.” |
| Nicole Jacque: | When I went to talk to one pharmacy, pretty large pharmacy, I mean, I literally came in with a slide deck. I thought I was going to have to convince them that this was okay to do, that there was a business case for doing it. And they were like, literally, it was two slides in. They’re like, “Yeah, we can do this.” |
| Alex Goldman: | And while Nicole’s hammering out the details to get GS into that compounding pharmacy, a compounding pharmacy from abroad announces that it’s been doing the same thing and that GS will be available at an American drugstore in the summer of 2024. |
| Nicole Jacque: | This was like Christmas and New Year’s and the 4th of July and my birthday. This was the thing that we had been working for. I didn’t care how we got there. I mean, I know talking to other people in the groups when I kind of broke the news, they were crying. It was just joy. It was just like, “Oh my God, we are there.” |
| Alex Goldman: | To be clear, GS is still not technically legal, but as far as the FDA is concerned, it is officially and explicitly allowed. |
| Nicole Jacque: | They specifically put out a letter saying, “This is an approved use of the drug.” |
| Alex Goldman: | Oh, wow. So you guys had enough clout that they were like, “All right, well, we need to let people know that this is kosher.” |
| Nicole Jacque: | They blessed it. They were like, “This is exactly what you’re supposed to do. This is an allowed use.” They were like, “Yeah, this is legit.” |
| Alex Goldman: | In June of 2024, Stokes Pharmacy began compounding GS441524. And as of today, it’s also in at least 15 other pharmacies, including national ones like Mixlab and Chewy, thanks in part to the advocacy work of Nicole Jacque and her colleagues. But when that little one-eyed kitten Otto got sick with FIP, our listener, Marlena, got her treatment under the black market system. This big development pushing it into pharmacies happened just weeks later, which honestly, she took the news with a much more positive spin than I would have. |
| Marlena Arjo: | If he ever relapsed, I can probably take him to the vet and they can deal with it and I don’t have to be involved. But why did I spend three months in hell buying illegal cat drugs for hundreds of dollars? |
| Alex Goldman: | Seriously. But even today with GS available and compounding pharmacies, the black market does still exist. One of the issues is that information has been slow to get out. So we’ve heard that even some vets will still refer people to FIP Warriors, which is still offering black market drugs and support. And look, experiences vary. We spoke to an ex warrior who pointed out that she’s worked with these drugs far longer than the new ones in pharmacies, and she’s confident in her treatment protocol. It’s complicated. |
| Reasonable people can disagree here on what’s right and wrong, but at its core, this is a story about a bunch of cat ladies trying to save people’s pets, improvising in the vacuum left by a pharma giant and a regulatory system too slow to catch up. | |
| Okay. Marlena, I just have one last question for you, which is, how is Otto doing? | |
| Marlena Arjo: | He’s good. For a while, it felt like he had a bit of a plague upon him because it was just one thing after another. It was like the eye and then the FIP and then he got this weird rash, I think from the injections, and now he still has some bald spots from that. And I was like, “This cat’s just… Something’s going to get him eventually,” but he seems to be good now. He’s also calmed down from when he was a kitten, so he’s still destroying stuff, but not on the daily basis, which is a little bit nicer. |
| Al Letson: | Thanks to Alex Goldman and the Hyperfixed podcast for bringing us this story. Find Hyperfixed on your favorite podcast app. We’ll also have a playlist of some of our favorite episodes for you in our show notes. |
| This story is reported and edited by Emma Cortland, Sari Soffer Sukenik, Amor Yates, and Alex Goldman. Our lead producer for this week’s show is Sari Soffer Sukenik. Kate Howard edited the show. Artis Curiskis and Naomi Barr are our fact checkers. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is the great Zulema Cobb. Score and sound designed by Alex Goldman, Breakmaster Cylinder, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, Yoaruda. Taki Telonidis is our deputy executive producer. Our executive producer is Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Camerado Lightning, support for reveals provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. |
