The moral of this story is

Know what you are selling, where the ingredients come from, and if some of them are from China, test your product for pollutants, toxins, and chemicals:

LOS ANGELES — Criminal charges have been filed against a company that prosecutors say imported and distributed nearly 90,000 tubes of Chinese toothpaste containing a poisonous substance and a wholesaler that supplied local stores with the tubes, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo announced Thursday.

Selective Imports Corp. sold the toothpaste containing diethylene glycol to distributors nationwide between December 2005 and May 2007, prosecutors said. Vernon Sales Inc. is accused of buying some of the tubes and reselling them to Los Angeles stores.

Diethylene glycol is a chemical used in antifreeze and as a solvent. Chinese manufacturers have used the chemical, known as DEG, as a cheaper alternative to glycerin, which thickens toothpaste. Exposure to DEG, however, can cause kidney and liver damage over time.

Vernon Sales President Kamyab Toofer, Vice President Pejman Mossay and the company itself each were charged with 14 criminal counts of receiving, selling and delivering an adulterated drug.

Selective Imports, its president, Frahad Nazarian and Vice President Yones Ghermezi each were charged with two criminal counts each of receiving, selling and delivering products containing DEG.

The companies are liable for distributing the tainted product even if they had no direct knowledge of the risk because they were negligent in not ensuring the toothpaste was safe, Supervising Deputy City Attorney Jerry Baik said.

The misdemeanor charges were filed Monday, he said. Each count carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Ghermezi said he had not seen the charges but was shocked by the filing. All the adulterated toothpaste was voluntarily pulled from shelves and from his Vernon, Calif., company's inventory eight months ago and destroyed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month, he said.

"Everything we had was destroyed by the FDA," Ghermezi said. "I thought the file had been closed."

Ghermezi said he supplied the toothpaste to Vernon Sales, also based in Vernon. He said his company never knowingly sold adulterated toothpaste and believed the product had FDA approval.

"We didn't know of the ingredients of the toothpaste," he said. "We don't (have) any intention of hurting people."

Unfortunately there will be more fines like these and more companies will pay for unknowingly passing on unchecked products until we get better testing. Someone could make a mint selling testing kits to households... testing kits that actually work, please. There are a lot of them out there that deliberately DON'T. In this Bush Era of Unaccountability, who wants real oversight?