China’s Snake Oil for the World
In January, Honor International Pharmtech was accused of shipping counterfeit drugs into the United States. Even so, the Chinese chemical company—whose motto is “Thinking Much of Honor”—was openly marketing its products in October to thousands of buyers here at the world’s biggest trade show for pharmaceutical ingredients.
Other Chinese chemical companies made the journey to the annual show as well, including one manufacturer recently accused by American authorities of supplying steroids to illegal underground labs and another whose representative was arrested at the 2006 trade show for patent violations. Also attending were two exporters owned by China’s government that had sold poison mislabeled as a drug ingredient, which killed nearly 200 people and injured countless others in Haiti and in Panama.
Yet another chemical company, Orient Pacific International, reserved an exhibition booth in Milan, but its owner, Kevin Xu, could not attend. He was in a Houston jail on charges of selling counterfeit medicine for schizophrenia, prostate cancer, blood clots, and Alzheimer’s disease, among other maladies.
—New York Times
Until recently, Marilyn Arons’ only experience of counterfeit goods was the fake Louis Vuitton handbag she bought on the street.... When she learned in March that her refill of Lipitor, a popular cholesterol-lowering drug, contained fake pills, she had plenty of angry, anxious thoughts on the matter. “If it wasn’t Lipitor I was taking,” she worried, “what was it?” Arons, who is suing several drug distributors, says she was furious when her pharmacist told her she would be fine. “Would you be fine,” she demanded, “if I paid you with counterfeit money?”
—U.S. News & World Report
As Lembit Rägo of the World Health Organization has succinctly put it: “Counterfeit drugs kill people.” Make no mistake about it, the risks are high. Today, at least one out of every ten containers of medicine worldwide is fake.
To understand the dangers, consider this small sample of drugs from China’s counterfeit pharmaceutical factories: cough syrup laced with antifreeze; meningitis vaccine and anemia drugs made from tap water; birth control pills that are nothing but compressed wheat flour, Lipitor and Norvasc for high cholesterol and high blood pressure without any active ingredients; Viagra and Cialis laced with strychnine; and malaria pills without a trace of their critical ingredient (artusenate).
China’s dominant role in the counterfeit drug trade is not just because of a huge production capacity and sophisticated distribution network. It is also because as fast as you can say, “Can you fill this prescription, please?” China’s highly skilled pirates are able to reproduce the so-called blister packaging, vacuum-formed clamshells, fake holograms, and distinctive pills so artfully and faithfully that drug companies typically can only detect fakes by using complex lab testing. This counterfeiting capability is no small feat, particularly since pharmaceutical companies continue to boost the complexity of their packaging in an effort to thwart counterfeiting.
The uncanny ability of the Chinese to excel in highly sophisticated piracy is attributable to precisely the same factors that have allowed China to become the world’s factory floor. Chief among them is the flood of foreign direct investment that has brought in all the latest sophisticated machinery necessary to knock off whatever drug or product from which money can be made. When the pills and packaging are complete, China’s counterfeit drug dealers then harness many of the same transportation, distribution, and sales channels established for legitimate purposes by foreign companies in China to distribute the illegitimate products worldwide.
Nor does it necessarily take a huge factory to produce counterfeit drugs. One of the simplest ways to create a phony batch of Viagra is to start with some of the authentic pills. Grind these up, add a little bulking agent such as boric acid, and remold the pills. Presto! You now have Chinese-style “Viagra Lite.” Oh, and by the way, boric acid’s more common use is as a pesticide to kill cockroaches and termites by attacking their nervous systems.
Whether it’s counterfeit Lipitor, Norvasc, Viagra, or Tamiflu, fake Chinese drugs can find their way into your medicine cabinet in many ways. In some cases, it happens when a big chain such as Rite Aid gets fooled by a supplier. In other cases, it happens when a small local pharmacy tries to keep its costs down by buying odd lots from wholesalers. More often than not, however, it is the increasingly double-edged sword called the World Wide Web that delivers these deadly drugs from the bowels of eastern China to people’s doorsteps. Consider these typical profiles of Internet drug consumers, who become all-too-easy prey for China’s drug pirates:
A Social Security couple who are already being eaten alive by medical expenses needs a new drug not yet covered by insurance or Medicare. So, they try an online “Canadian” pharmacy that offers cheap drugs but that is really operating out of Heilongjiang Province in Northeast China.
A housewife suffering from chronic depression is too embarrassed to go to the local pharmacy for her Prozac so she opts for the anonymity of the Internet, while her workaholic, jet-traveling husband is simply too busy to get his Ambien sleeping pills anywhere else. Meanwhile, their weightlifting 17-year-old son has been secretly going online for his monthly orders of muscle-popping Deca-Durobolin anabolic steroids.
Finally, and as the anchor of the Internet boom in counterfeit drugs, there is the aging Baby Boomer who is not as good as he once was in the bedroom but wants to be as good once as he ever was. He is the easiest mark of all for the pirates and the number one reason why Viagra is the Internet’s top-selling counterfeit drug.