What? You say worrying about which food ingredients imported from China might not be what they say they are isn’t providing you with enough stress? You’d like more? No problem! Now you can worry about the pharmaceutical ingredients imported from China and going into your medicines aren’t what they say they are … such as diethylene glycol (the main ingredient in anti-freeze) posing as glycerin:

Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste, and other products.

It seems to have been going on for some time now, though not in the United States (yet). Well, some did get shipped here in 1995, but it was caught before it poisoned anyone.

I used to be opposed to buying anything made in China because I felt they were going to economically crush us at some point (still do feel that way), and I have done my best to avoid buying anything made in China, even though it’s virtually impossible to avoid doing so 100%. This is really just one more reason for me to not want to buy anything made in China, but on things like ingredients for food and medicine, there’s really no way at all for me to tell where in the world everything in that bag of chips or bottle of cold medicine came from. I want proper labeling on everything, and I want it now. If something has even a minute fraction of a milliliter or microgram of anything from China in it, I want to know so I can put it back on the shelf and walk on by. I don’t want ANYTHING from China going into my body.

The original, full New York Times report can be found here, for those who want to spend even more time reading about this (long article).