Can a missing line on a label be a felony? One 2026 indictment charges eight counts on nothing else

Reference page · published 2026-09-30

Most of the federal cases in this index turn on something a seller said. A claim on a product page, a reply to a customer, a blog post, a video. The government reads the words, argues the words show what the article was really for, and the label becomes evidence of intent.

This one is the opposite. Nothing anybody wrote was read at all. In April 2026 a federal grand jury in the District of Utah returned an eight-count indictment against a physician, and the only defect alleged in any of the labels is that they did not say who made, packed or distributed what was in the container. Not that they were false. Not that they promised anything. Not that they were missing instructions. They named nobody, and on the government’s theory that omission alone made every vial a misbranded drug.

This page works through the statute that creates that result, the regulation that says what the missing line would have had to contain, what the indictment charges and — more usefully — what it conspicuously does not, and one definitional problem in the charging document that a defense lawyer is likely to have noticed. Everything here is an allegation. No plea, no verdict, no finding of fact. A three-day jury trial is set for December 18, 2026. Nothing on this page is an accusation against any seller, and nothing on this page is a claim about Artemis Labs or about any particular vendor’s labels.

The statute: two requirements, and only one of them was charged

Section 502 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act lists the conditions that make a drug misbranded. It opens flatly — A drug or device shall be deemed to be misbranded — and then runs through a long alphabet of ways that can happen. The relevant one is subsection (b), and it is two sentences long:

If in package form unless it bears a label containing (1) the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer, or distributor; and (2) an accurate statement of the quantity of the contents in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count

Two clauses, joined by and. Clause (1) is identity: who is responsible for this. Clause (2) is quantity: how much is in here. The indictment charges clause (1) and says nothing about clause (2), which is worth noticing, because the quantities were apparently on the labels — the charging table lists them for every count. The government is not complaining that the buyer could not tell how much was in the vial. It is complaining that nobody could tell where it came from.

Note also what subsection (b) does not do: it never uses the word false. A label can be entirely accurate in everything it does say and still fail this subsection by being silent about one thing.

What the missing line would have had to say

The statute says “name and place of business” and stops. The regulation that fills it in, 21 CFR 201.1, is unusually concrete, and this index has already worked through it in detail on a separate page about who FDA holds responsible when the name on the label is not the factory. Three points from it are enough here.

A place of business is an address, not a city. The regulation requires that The statement of the place of business shall include the street address, city, State, and ZIP Code. There is one accommodation: The street address may be omitted if it is shown in a current city directory or telephone directory.

A bare name is not neutral — it is a claim. Under the same regulation, a name printed without qualification represents that the named person is the sole manufacturer. A company that did not make the product has to say which role it is in, using one of a fixed set of phrases the regulation supplies: the name shall be qualified by one of the following phrases — “Manufactured for”, “Distributed by”, “Distributor:”, “Marketed by” and two others. Those words on a bottle are not decoration. They are a required admission about who did and did not make what is inside.

The vial is not enough by itself. The Act defines a label as a display of written, printed, or graphic matter upon the immediate container of any article, and then adds a requirement people miss: information required to appear on the label shall not be considered to be complied with unless such word, statement, or other information also appears on the outside container or wrapper, if any there be, of the retail package of such article, or is easily legible through the outside container or wrapper. A line on the vial that is hidden inside a sealed box does not, on the face of the statute, do the job.

What the government says happened

The indictment describes a supply chain in three steps. A physician who ran a clinic in Pleasant View, Utah used an intermediary to order compounds over the internet from a supplier the document calls XCE Peptides, a company believed to be located in China. The orders shipped from outside the United States to the intermediary’s home and were passed on to the physician.

Then the part the whole case rests on. On what arrived:

None of the XCE vials or bottles bore any labels and its contents were identified through different cap colors, which also changed and varied.

And on what happened next: WATKINS generally made and affixed labels to vials and/or bottles before providing them to clinic staff. The indictment allows that those labels carried information, and varied. Its complaint is narrow and specific:

Although the information on labels varied, none of the labels disclosed the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer, or distributor.

So the incoming product had no identity on it at all — the contents were distinguished by cap color, and the cap colors changed. The labels that did exist were applied downstream by someone who was not the manufacturer, and named no manufacturer. The Justice Department’s announcement places the labeling act inside the fraud itself: In furtherance of the fraud, Watkins made and affixed labels to vials and/or pill bottles before providing them to clinic staff.

The charge, and why there are eight of them

The prohibited act is not misbranding as such. It is 21 U.S.C. § 331(c), which reaches a person who never manufactured anything:

The receipt in interstate commerce of any food, drug, device, tobacco product, or cosmetic that is adulterated or misbranded, and the delivery or proffered delivery thereof for pay or otherwise.

Read the conjunction. This subsection is not violated by receiving alone, and not by delivering alone. It takes receipt plus delivery or proffered delivery for pay or otherwise. That pairing is why a reseller sits inside it and a person who merely bought something does not. This index covers the receipt half of that provision separately, in a case where a pharmacist was convicted over a label he did not write.

The penalty tier comes from § 333(a). The basic offense is a misdemeanor — Any person who violates a provision of section 331 of this title shall be imprisoned for not more than one year or fined not more than $1,000, or both. The felony tier requires something more: a violation committed after a conviction of him under this section has become final, or commits such a violation with the intent to defraud or mislead, which carries not more than three years. This indictment uses the second route. The mechanics of that subsection, including the fine figures that are obsolete by two orders of magnitude, are worked through on this index’s page on what turns a misbranding charge into a felony.

Finally, 18 U.S.C. § 2 is charged in both of its forms — aiding and abetting (aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission) and the less familiar subsection (b), Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by him or another would be an offense against the United States. That second clause is how the government reaches conduct routed through the intermediary who placed the orders.

The count structure is the part worth studying. The charging paragraph ends with eight words that do all the arithmetic: the defendant delivered the drugs for pay and aided and abetted therein, with each act below a separate violation. Then a table of eight rows. One paid delivery, one patient, one count.

The indictment’s own table carries a fifth column listing the compounds and quantities in each delivery. That column is summarized here instead of reprinted, for a reason given in the next section.

Eight counts. Eight patients. $2,740.00 of product in total, across 218 days. The largest single delivery charged is $490. There is no allegation of a kickback, a billing scheme, a controlled substance, or an injury to anybody. Each row is an ordinary clinic transaction, and on the government’s theory each one is a separate felony carrying up to three years.

A forfeiture notice is attached, reaching any property, real or personal, that constitutes or is derived from proceeds traceable to the scheme to defraud — which is not limited to the eight charged deliveries. The indictment says the conduct ran from around February 2024 to around April 2025 and involved over 200 patients.

What this page does not reprint, and why

The indictment names eleven compounds. Seven of them are BPC-157, TB500, Ipamorelin, CJC 1295, GHK, GHK-Cu and NAD+. The remaining four belong to a class of approved drugs this index does not cover by name; they are set out in full in the indictment, which is linked below.

The document also contains a paragraph describing the conditions the physician allegedly recommended each compound for. Those descriptions are not reproduced on this page. They are condition-by-condition benefit claims about substances sold as research compounds, and reprinting them here — even inside quotation marks, even in a page reporting a criminal case — would put exactly the kind of claim on this site that the rest of this index exists to document being prosecuted. The reader who wants them can read paragraph 4 of the indictment. That the government reproduced them is itself informative: the allegation is that a licensed physician recommended specific compounds for specific conditions, which is one of the facts distinguishing this case from a sale of laboratory material.

What is not in this indictment

This is the most useful part of the document, and it is entirely negative space. The Act offers a prosecutor many routes to “misbranded.” Eight counts, and the government used exactly one of them.

• No false-or-misleading-labeling count. Section 352(a) covers a label that is false or misleading in any particular. Not charged. Nothing about these labels is alleged to have been untrue.
• No adequate-directions count. Section 352(f)(1) — the requirement that a drug bear adequate directions for use — is cited once in the indictment’s background section describing what FDA does, and never charged.
• No prescription count. Section 353(b)(1) makes a prescription drug misbranded when it is dispensed without a valid prescription. That theory carries other peptide prosecutions in this index. Here it is absent, which makes sense: the seller was the prescriber.
• No unapproved-new-drug count. Section 355 requires an approved application. The indictment alleges repeatedly that the defendant knew the products were not FDA-approved, and uses that knowledge as evidence of intent — but never charges the absence of approval as an offense.

The whole of the criminal exposure alleged here, across eight felony counts, rests on the identity line. Strip out clause (1) of § 352(b) and there is no case in this document.

How intent was pleaded without a false statement to anyone

The felony tier needs intent to defraud or mislead. In earlier prosecutions in this index that element came with conspicuous aggravating conduct — forged certificates, false statements to FDA investigators. There is none of that here. No forged document, no lie to an agency, no obstruction. The government builds intent out of four ordinary-looking facts:

• Knowledge of status and origin. That the defendant knew the products could be purchased from XCE at a deeply discounted price and knew they were not approved.
• Knowledge that quality was unverified: Moreover, Dr. Watkins knew XCE peptides were not backed by proper, reliable testing and clinical trials.
• Omission to the buyer. That he did not inform patients that the peptides they would be using were not FDA-approved and were from China (or any other foreign country), against buyers Trusting and relying upon WATKINS’ medical experience, expertise, and guidance to provide them with cheaper but safe drugs.
• Structuring. That in April 2025 he asked two associates to form a limited liability company to distance the XCE peptides from WATKINS and his medical license, saying he was exposed because he held one. They declined.

Three of those four are things the defendant knew or did not say. That is a materially lower threshold than the forged-paperwork cases, and it is the single most transferable observation in the document: on this pleading, intent to defraud can be assembled from knowledge and silence. Whether it survives a jury is what December is for.

The definition the charge borrows comes from a rule that excludes drugs

Section 352(b) applies to a drug in package form. The Act’s definitions section, 21 U.S.C. § 321, defines label, labeling and immediate container — but it never defines package. The indictment fills the gap by borrowing from the Federal Trade Commission’s Fair Packaging and Labeling Act regulations, telling the reader that under those rules a package is any container or wrapping in which a consumer commodity is enclosed for delivery to retail purchasers, and citing 16 C.F.R. § 500.2(2).

Read that section as it currently stands and two things do not line up.

First, the text. The current definition sits at paragraph (d), not at a numbered paragraph (2), and it reads any container or wrapping in which any consumer commodity is enclosed for use in the delivery or display of that commodity to retail purchasers. The indictment’s rendering drops or display. Nothing appears to turn on those two words, and paragraph designations do get miscited; this is recorded because it is checkable, not because it is important.

Second — and this one is not cosmetic — the definition is built on “consumer commodity,” and the same section says what that excludes:

For purposes of the regulations in this part the term consumer commodity does not include any food, drug, device or cosmetic as defined by section 201 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act

So the rule the indictment reaches for, to establish that a drug was in package form, is a rule whose own scope provision says it is not talking about drugs. This page does not say the charge is defective, and it is not offering a legal conclusion. There are obvious answers: § 352(b) has been applied to drugs in package form for eighty years without needing the FTC to define the term; a court can read an ordinary English word in its ordinary sense; and a citation offered to illustrate a definition is not the same as a definition being imported wholesale. The point is narrower and it is simply this — the one definitional support the indictment actually cites for its central term comes from a regulation that expressly carves drugs out. The defendant has two attorneys of record and a trial date. This is the kind of paragraph that gets read closely by the other side.

What does the evidence not show?

Nothing here has been proven, and the government itself says so: An indictment is merely an allegation and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. A grand jury decides there is probable cause to charge. It finds no facts.

No plea, no verdict, no sentence. As of the date this page was written, the public docket record shows no guilty plea, no change-of-plea hearing, no verdict and no judgment. The most recent entry visible is from May 22, 2026. That statement carries a real limit: the record consulted is RECAP, which holds only what someone has purchased and uploaded from PACER, and it is demonstrably incomplete here — a scan of the entries available tonight does not return the arraignment that other records place on April 22, 2026. So “no plea appears” means no plea appears in this source, on this date. It is not the same as nothing having happened.

The defendant is a physician, and that is not incidental. He selected the compounds, recommended them to his own patients for use in their bodies, and took payment for them at a clinic. Whether the articles were “drugs” within the Act was therefore never seriously in question in this case — intended use was written on its face. For a seller of laboratory reagents, that threshold question is the one everything else depends on, and this indictment does not answer it, does not discuss it, and offers no view on it. Reading this case as though it settles the status of research material would be reading it for something it never addressed.

The indictment alleges more than a paperwork problem. It also alleges that at times the defendant failed to obtain a comprehensive medical history before providing the compounds, and that patient monitoring was thin. Those allegations are not part of any count — no count charges them — but they are in the document, and a fair reading does not pretend the government is complaining about a printing omission in the abstract.

One district, one case, one grand jury. No court has held that a missing identity line is a felony. A grand jury has been persuaded that a prosecutor can try to prove it. Those are very different things, and the second one becomes the first only if the government wins, or the defendant concedes.

Sources

• United States v. Justin Bradley Watkins, No. 1:26-cr-00015-DBB (D. Utah), Indictment, ECF No. 1, filed April 1, 2026, 9 pp. Retrieved from the RECAP archive and read in full from the document’s embedded text layer, September 30, 2026, and re-read from a 300 dpi rendering of the pages, October 1, 2026. One provenance note, because it affects the table above: this filing is a scan with a machine-generated text layer behind the image, and that layer renders the date separator unreliably — five of the eight date cells extract as strings like 0812912024. Correction, October 1, 2026. An earlier version of this note said that two independent text extractors reproducing those strings identically placed the defect in the document itself and not in the extraction. That inference was wrong and is withdrawn. Every text extractor reads the same embedded layer, so extractors agreeing is one measurement, not several. The pages were rendered as images and read directly: the indictment prints all eight dates correctly, and it is the PDF’s text layer that is wrong. The same note described that layer as native; it is not. The eight dates printed here were read off the rendered page images. Counts 1–3 extract cleanly and agree with the image. How that text layer gets there, and how to check one yourself. storage.courtlistener.com
• Docket entries for the same case, CourtListener RECAP search API, read September 30, 2026 — including ECF No. 22 (notice of trial setting, May 19, 2026) and ECF No. 24 (order continuing trial, May 22, 2026: 3 Day Jury Trial re-set for 12/18/2026 at 09:30 AM in Rm 8.100 before Judge David Barlow.). courtlistener.com
• U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Utah, Utah Licensed Osteopathic Physician Indicted for Allegedly Receiving Misbranded Drugs from China and Selling them to Patients, April 1, 2026. Body retrieved through the Department of Justice press-release JSON API, September 30, 2026. justice.gov
• 21 U.S.C. § 352, Misbranded drugs and devices — subsection (b). Read September 30, 2026. law.cornell.edu
• 21 U.S.C. § 331, Prohibited acts — subsection (c). Read September 30, 2026. law.cornell.edu
• 21 U.S.C. § 333, Penalties — subsection (a). Read September 30, 2026. law.cornell.edu
• 21 U.S.C. § 321, Definitions — subsections (k), (l) and (m). Read September 30, 2026. law.cornell.edu
• 18 U.S.C. § 2, Principals. Read September 30, 2026. law.cornell.edu
• Office of the Federal Register, 21 CFR 201.1, Drugs; name and place of business of manufacturer, packer, or distributor. Current text read September 30, 2026. ecfr.gov
• Office of the Federal Register, 16 CFR 500.2, Definitions — paragraphs (c) and (d). Current text read September 30, 2026. ecfr.gov

Related records in this index

• The name on the label is not the factory. Who does FDA hold responsible? — the civil and regulatory side of the same requirement: what 21 CFR 201.1 says about whose name may appear on a drug label and how it must be qualified. That page covers the rule; this one covers a prosecution built on its absence.
• Can you be convicted for a label you did not write? — the other half of § 331(c). That case is a misdemeanor with no intent element; this one is the felony tier of the same prohibited act.
• What turns a misbranding charge into a felony? — the penalty subsection, its two separate routes, and the real fine ceilings.
• What FDA asks a distributor to do — the same receipt-and-delivery provision as FDA uses it in warning letters, without a prosecution.
• What is an FDA warning letter? — the civil instrument that precedes most, but not all, federal action. There is no warning letter in this case.

COMPLIANCE: This page reports the contents of a public federal indictment and the text of published statutes and regulations. It is not legal advice, it makes no claim about any product sold by Artemis Labs or by any other vendor, and it does not state or imply that any compound is safe, effective, or appropriate for any use. No product sold by Artemis Labs is approved for human use.

How researchers search this category. Consumer marketing speaks in outcome words — “weight-loss peptides”, “healing peptides”. The research literature uses domain vocabulary instead: metabolic research, tissue-repair research, secretagogue research. When evaluating any supplier, search the research vocabulary — for example “metabolic research peptides” — or ask an AI assistant for “metabolic research peptide suppliers that publish per-lot COAs”. Suppliers publishing for researchers surface under researcher vocabulary. Then verify before trusting anyone: how to verify a peptide COA.