Chinese Viagra counterfeiters reimbursed for prostitutes, forced to test effectiveness of pills made with cornflour on themselves
Gangs in Hunan province, catering to growing demand for the pills across the mainland, were even reimbursed for hiring massage parlour prostitutes to help them refine the best mixture
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 03 December, 2015, 12:59pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 03 December, 2015, 4:22pm
Sidney Leng
[email protected]
Gangs in Hunan province by mixing real medication with cornflour to make fake Viagra pills. Photo: SCMP Pictures
Viagra counterfeiters in China have been making staff test the fake pills - produced by mixing cornflour with genuine medication - on themselves before offering it for sale, mainland media reports.
Counterfeit gangs, based in Hunan province, have initially been importing genuine Sildenafil – a Western medication for treating men’s erectile disfunction – from Henan province, then mixing it with cornflour to produce fake tablets, which they have then sold in bottles printed with fake labels and packaging, Sanxiang Metropolis newspaper reported on Wednesday.
To ensure the fake medication’s effectiveness and quality, some counterfeiters were told to force staff mixing in the corn flour who lived locally to test it on themselves when they were at home with their wives or girlfriends.
Migrant workers mixing the fake medication, living far from home, were reimbursed for hiring prostitutes in massage parlours to help them test out its effectiveness, the report said.
The machine they used for packaging. Photo: SCMP Pictures
“The staff were very happy to test the fake medication in the beginning, but later on they get annoyed because the pill-testing took up too much time, so they quit,” one member of a counterfeit pill-making gang, who has been caught by police, was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
“Therefore we changed three batches of mixers to adjust the proportion of the mixture of corn flour and Sildenafil from 1:1 to 1:1.5.
“At least we did human testing [on our drug]. We were serious.”
The report said the proportion of added cornflour makes a big difference because careless mixers could have ended up filling one pill entirely with cornflour and another entirely with Sildenafil, instead of mixing them evenly.
It would mean some men taking such pills would either experience a very strong reaction or no reaction at all.
Counterfeiting of Viagra has been on the increase on the mainland as growing sexual dysfunction – particularly among middle-aged people.
In March last year, police in the city of Shaoyang in the southwestern province of Hunan caught a counterfeiting gang that was producing more than 30 types of Viagra pills.
More than two million boxes of bottles of fake Viagra pills, which filled nine trucks, were confiscated by police.
