A doctor who overprescribed appetite suppressants — commonly known as "nabi-yak" (butterfly pills) — to non-obese patients over several years has been referred to prosecutors.
The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) said Monday that it had caught and referred to prosecutors a doctor identified as "A" at a family medicine clinic in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, on charges of violating the Narcotics Control Act for illegally prescribing appetite suppressants to patients. The case marks the first criminal action against illegal prescriptions by medical professionals since the MFDS launched its dedicated narcotics investigation unit last year.
The investigation found that from 2019 through January this year, Doctor A prescribed a total of 52,841 appetite suppressant pills across 907 occasions to 24 patients whose body mass index (BMI) was around 20 — well below the obesity threshold. The drugs are classified as psychotropic substances, including phentermine and phendimetrazine.
In some cases, the doctor prescribed more than 17,000 pills to individual patients over 147 months. Methods included issuing prescriptions without medical examinations and writing overlapping prescriptions while previous ones were still active. Appetite suppressants are in principle authorized only as short-term adjunctive therapy for patients with a BMI of 30 or above, or those with a BMI of 27 or above accompanied by risk factors such as hypertension or diabetes.
The drugs, colloquially called "butterfly pills," can cause dependency and withdrawal symptoms and carry risks of cardiovascular abnormalities and psychiatric side effects including anxiety and insomnia, requiring strict prescription oversight.