Following an amendment to China’s pharmaceutical administration law, a man from Hong Kong has been released on bail after spending over five years in police custody for selling “fake” cancer treatment drugs, financial news outlet Jiemian reported Thursday.

In 2014, Lin Yongxiang was criminally detained along with 14 others for smuggling and selling unapproved cancer drugs manufactured in India to Chinese hospitals and patients, according to the media report. Four years later, a local court in the eastern Jiangsu province sentenced Lin to more than six years in jail, not including the time he had already spent in police detention.

After the new amendment went into effect Dec. 1, however, the same court in Jiangsu on Thursday granted Lin bail after a retrial hearing, Jiemian reported. The amended law no longer classifies drugs approved outside of China as “fake,” and people who import “small amounts” of them may now face lighter sentences or none at all.

Several individuals across the country have been putting themselves at great personal risk by importing foreign medicines for desperate patients. Ke Ranhong, the founder of a company that helped patients purchase cheap generic drugs from overseas, is facing a potential 12-year prison sentence for selling “fake drugs” since his arrest in the eastern city of Hangzhou last year. (Image: Corbis/VCG)