My daughter was a beautiful size 10, so why did she buy killer diet pills online?
Freely available on the internet, they can cause epilepsy, psychosis and, in Eloise’s case, death. In this searing interview, her mother gives a stark warning to every parent
THE last time Fiona Parry saw her daughter Eloise, she was excitedly heading off on a shopping trip with her younger sister. ‘She was full of life, bouncing around in the car, joking and laughing,’ she recalls. Yet within 24 hours of that carefree encounter, Eloise was dead, lying amid a tangle of intensive care tubes, a legacy of the desperate but futile battle by doctors to save her life. She was just 21.
Little wonder that less than two weeks later, her mother is still palpably numb with grief — a grief exacerbated by the senseless manner of her daughter’s death.
Ella, as Fiona affectionately calls her, died after taking diet pills she had bought on the internet. She had, to all intents and purposes, poisoned herself. The pills she had taken contained DNP, a chemical primarily used as a fertiliser and also in explosives, but which has also been found to speed up the metabolism in humans, causing rapid weight loss without dieting.
This side- effect was discovered by accident in World War I in munitions factories where many — mostly female — workers lost dramatic amounts of weight (their skin also turned yellow, and they developed cataracts).
Scientists at Stanford University started experimenting with the drug as a diet aid in 1933, before withdrawing it in 1938 following several deaths.
Not surprisingly, DNP is banned for human consumption in the UK. Just two tablets can be a lethal. Eloise had taken eight.
Fiona, from Shrewsbury, Shropshire, will never know why her daughter resorted to such desperate measures to lose weight. At 5ft 10in and a steady size 10, she certainly didn’t need them.
All she does know is that something her daughter had taken in the belief she’d quickly burn fat was in fact a deadly toxin that had been infecting her system for weeks.
‘In the weeks leading up to her death she had been experiencing problems with high temperatures and pains in her muscles. She had gone to the doctor a couple of times but they couldn’t find anything wrong,’ Fiona says.
‘None of us could make any sense of it because of course no one knew what she was doing. With hindsight, the cause of her problems was these tablets.’
What a tragic waste of a young and promising life. Eloise was thriving at university and hoped in time to become a youth worker.
And the terrifying truth is that hundreds of thousands of young women like her are risking their lives by buying diet pills (most of which do not work) online.
In the past ten years, DNP alone has claimed at least five lives in Britain and 60 worldwide. Countless others have been left with serious health issues from epilepsy to heart conditions as a consequence of using unlicensed slimming pills, containing everything from amphetamines to steroids.
Dr James Woolley, consultant psychiatrist at the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, South-West London, knows this all too well. ‘I have seen patients come to considerable harm, such as suffering epileptic fits, psychosis and self-injury, due to over-medicating themselves with supplies of prescription drugs obtained through the internet,’ he says.
‘Some of these have been due to medication advertised online as “diet pills,” but which are in fact amphetamines which suppress appetite.’
Even the term ‘diet pill’ is misleading, as GP and weight-loss expert Dr Ian Campbell points out. ‘There isn’t really any such thing,’ he explains.
‘At the moment we have one effective, weight-loss medication called Orlistat, and its technical title is “lipase inhibi- tor”. This means it reduces the amount of fat absorbed by the gut. Marketed as an anti- obesity drug, it can be prescribed by doctors for overweight patients struggling to diet.’
Orlistat also has a lower dose ‘sister’ drug, Alli, which is available without prescription and which jostles for space on pharmacy shelves alongside a host of over-the-counter slimming aids and herbal supplements which are marketed as metabolism boosters or appetite suppressants.
The trouble, according to Dr Campbell, is that they’re largely ineffectual.
They are however, perfectly legal — unlike many of those sold from unregulated internet pharmacies, many of whom market prescription-only medication as ‘diet pills’.
Many of these contain amphetamines or steroids, or even banned ingredients like Sibutramine, a prescription-only appetite suppressant taken off the mar- ket in 2010, as it put people at increased risk of strokes and heart attacks.
Little wonder that last year the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), part of the Department of Health, closed down more than 1,600 websites which were il l egally advertising and selling medicines, many of t hem f or slimming products.
But this does not eradicate products sold on websites based outside Britain, over which the UK authorities have no powers. And while West Mercia Police are still scouring Eloise Parry’s mobile phone and laptop to establish where she sourced her lethal pills, her mother believes she ordered the nondescript white bag of yellow pills found after her death from a foreign website.
Today, Fiona, 51, an A-level chemistry teacher at an international school, remains bewildered by how her beautiful daughter can have been sucked into what she calls the ‘dark and horrible’ world of diet pills.
A calm, eloquent figure, she is anxious to emphasise her daughter was a bright, independently-minded soul who wasn’t easily duped.
‘Ella wasn’t a shrinking violet and she spoke her mind. You would think someone like her would be less susceptible to the pressures to look a certain way, but she still fell foul of it,’ she says.
Ella was the second of Fiona’s five children, aged between 13 and 28 — her siblings were James, 28, Robert, 15, Becky, 17 and 13-year old Kyle. She was particularly close to her maternal grandparents and the day before she died had visited her grandmother, who was in hospital, following a hip replacement. She’d excitedly spoken of the present she’d bought for her grandfather, Ian.
‘She bought a little plaque that said something like “Grandads have hair of silver and hearts of gold,” Fiona recalls sadly.
Ella had always been advanced for her years. ‘She was one of those little girls who did everything before you expected her too,’ Fiona recalls with a smile. ‘She walked really early. She could ride a bike when she was two. ‘
As a young girl however, she was not without her problems. At junior school, she was bullied for having ginger hair, coming home one day in tears because one bully had cut out a chunk of it.
‘She dyed it as soon as she was old enough,’ says Fiona. ‘You look through pictures now and you’ll find not a single one with her natural hair colour.’
Then, as a teenager, she developed bulimia — something her mother wasn’t
Just two tablets can be lethal. Eloise took eight
‘I can’t make sense of the fact she has died’
‘The sad truth is that people want a quick fix’
aware of until two years ago, when she came across an appointment card for a treatment clinic among her daughter’s things.
‘I had no idea,’ she says quietly. ‘With bulimia you don’t always lose weight and she hadn’t fluctuated. There were no other obvious signs. It was difficult, as by that time Ella wasn’t living at home. I felt I needed to let her tell me in her own time but we never discussed it. I felt reassured she had put herself into the hands of professionals.’
Eloise had everything to live for. This summer she was due to complete her degree course in family and childcare studies at Glyndwr University and was hoping to take a master’s with a view to becoming a youth worker. ‘She was getting A grades in her assignments and was on course for a first and desperate to keep it that way.’
Yet unbeknown to Fiona, in the weeks leading up to her death, Eloise was irrevocably damaging her health by swallowing diet pills.
Around six weeks before she died, her daughter, who lived alone in a rented flat in Shrewsbury, was taken to the A&E department of the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital by ambulance after collapsing while at university.
‘She told me later that she had a spiked temperature and jaundice, but the hospital could not work out why,’ her mother recalls.
‘They ran a series of tests which showed no infection, while her liver was also functioning well so they could not make sense of it. They kept her in overnight, then discharged her the next day but said they would continue to monitor her.’
In the days and weeks that followed Eloise also complained of muscle pain, something her mother now knows is another side-effect of taking DNP, which encourages the body to burn first fat, then muscle.
Baffled by what was ailing her daughter, Fiona took comfort from the fact that doctors were carrying out ongoing tests. ‘It was hard to know what to do but I told myself she was in good hands — although of course now we know that they didn’t know what they were looking for.’
It seems, too, Eloise took a long time to make the link between the inoffensive looking bag of tablets in her handbag and her physical deterioration, although it appears she finally did.
In the days before she died, she spoke to Glyndwr University Student Guild’s vice-president Marc Caldecott about starting an awareness campaign about weight-loss pills — insisting that no specifics were named to avoid luring students into temptation.
Tragically, it was already too late for her. At around 3pm on a Sunday afternoon, as she sat marking homework in the comfortable family home, her mother received a phone call from an A&E nurse at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital asking her to come in.
By then Eloise was already dead, although Fiona was not informed until she arrived at the hospital.
‘One of the first things I saw was her car in the car park,’ she says. ‘ So I thought that whatever had happened couldn’t be that bad as she had driven herself there.’
Her relief was horribly short-lived. Once in A&E, Fiona was immediately escorted into a side room by a police officer, a nurse and a doctor.
‘They said it wasn’t good news,’ she remembers quietly. ‘That was the point at which reality left the room. They took me to see her but I couldn’t take in that she’d gone. I felt like if I gave her a shake she would wake up.’
The manner of Ella’s death, meanwhile, could not have been more upsetting. Although she had seemed in reasonable health when she was admitted, her body was already in the process of shutting down.
First, her breathing, then her heart, stopped as doctors and nurses frantically tried to revive her. Around three hours after she was admitted, she was pronounced dead.
While an inquest has yet to record a formal verdict, doctors are in no doubt as to what killed her, after they found the bag of pills in her handbag.
They looked innocuous enough; a packet of yellow pills, with a little white sticker embossed with the letters DNP. This was enough for doctors to know it contained an industrial chemical.
First used in the manufacture of munitions in France during World War I, by the Thirties it was being marketed as a weight-loss drug, until more and more side-effects were reported, including cataracts, skin lesions and raised body temperatures. Some people were in effect cooked to death.
By 1938, it had been banned for human consumption in the UK because of its effects on the nervous system, but was still available legally for use as a dye and pesticide.
But its gruesome history has not stopped countless others turning to it for a quick weight loss fix. Enter ‘DNP diet pills’ into any internet search engine and it’s not difficult to find retailers offering it, with 100 capsules costing around £70.
Often marketed to bodybuilders, it has latterly been touted on some internet forums as the world’s ‘best’ diet pill. This makes Fiona Parry all the more desperate to raise awareness about her daughter’s plight.
‘We can’t get rid of the internet and nor would I want to, and I can’t undo what has happened to our family, but I can make people aware of the terrible dangers of buying diet pills online,’ she says. ‘You just can’t predict how your body will react but the people who are selling them don’t care about that. They’re just making money.’
It’s a sentiment echoed by Geoffrey Houston, a stockbroker-turned-lay minister from Chesham, Buckinghamshire, who in September 2012 lost his 23-year-old medical student daughter Sarah after she took DNP — something that a coroner later ruled was ‘entirely’ responsible for her death. ‘It is exploitation, and I think it is exploiting the vulnerable and the impressionable,’ he declared at the time.
And, as Chief Inspector Jennifer Mattinson from West Mercia Police points out, it’s all too easy to be lured into a false sense of security when buying something from the comfort of your living room or bedroom.
‘People don’t think they’re buying something that could be harmful. There is something about a package arriving through the post which legitimises it somehow,’ she says.
‘But it is the equivalent of buying a packet of pills from a stranger in a foreign back street. Most of us wouldn’t dream of doing that — yet that is what we are doing online.’
A spokesman for the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, meanwhile, made their position abundantly clear. ‘When buying medicines from an unregulated source you cannot be certain the medicines are what they say they are. At best you will lose your money and at worst you risk seriously damaging your health.
‘Many websites are based overseas, which can make things difficult, but we do work with international partners to close down sites illegally selling medicines to people in the UK.’
As summer approaches and many women — and it is largely women — panic about their figures, it’s likely that many more will be lured into seeking internet diet pills to lose weight.
‘The sad truth is that people want a quick fix,’ says Dr Campbell. ‘And there are any number of unscrupulous characters willing to provide them.’
Back in Shrewsbury, Fiona can only cling on to her memories of her vibrant daughter.
Instead of looking forward to her graduation ceremony this summer, she is instead preparing to bury her on Monday. ‘There’s a large part of me that still thinks Ella is going to walk through the door,’ she says. ‘I still can’t make sense of the fact that she died.’