Anticounterfeiting And NIR: A Hong Kong Diary

The good news? It took some work to find counterfeits. The bad news? I found plenty. Since I didn’t speak Chinese, I presented my list of medicines. I went for the easy choices: although AIDS drugs, growth hormone, cancer drugs, and pain preparations are heavily counterfeited, nobody had those when I requested them (my initial list included Combivir, Diflucan, Epivir, Epogen, Procrit, Serostim, and Sustiva). So mostly I asked for medicines that a healthy person might buy in a drug store: Norvasc, Lipitor, Lamisil, Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra. None of the shops with herbal ingredients had them, but in one case a gesturing gentleman eagerly transcended the language barrier and walked me down the street a couple of store fronts to the larger shop that he thought could help me.

In Hong Kong markets, Western medicines are always displayed separately from traditional Chinese medicines. In some shops, herbal and animal ingredients and supplements are displayed openly, where packaged pharmaceuticals are generally kept in glass display cases.

There amidst the shampoos, toothpastes, tiger extracts and liquor products, there were in fact some Western medicines. But buying them wasn’t like shopping in a pharmacy in the United States. There were many single-dose packages: one pill, or two or four. One package, of Pepzan, an H2 blocker made in New Zealand, was open. It contained a blister pack of 15 tablets, although the package claimed it contained 120 tablets. The price, written in pen on the flap, was HK$110 – a bit much, but I bought it. The cashier charged me HK$15 – the price for the partial pack, of course. I also found a pack of Viagra – one 50mg tablet, for HK$95. It looked like a genuine Pfizer product, with a blue Pfizer sticker on it, but nobody asked me any questions about prescriptions or why I, a woman, was buying it.

I had the list of top counterfeited drugs on my PDA, and I handed it to one English-speaking pharmacist and said I was interested in all of the drugs on the list. He handled the PDA with reverence, and pushed a few buttons, before handing it back and saying he didn’t have any of those drugs. From the look on his face, I could tell he was wondering why I was using a computer for something I could have accomplished with a piece of paper.

The pharmacies that did sell Western drugs were all glassfronted, with glass display cases, and all tiny by American standards, about 10’ x 12’. Many had “No Fakes” pledges on their windows, and many had displays claiming to be authorized dealers for Pfizer and Lilly. I asked for Norvasc, Lipitor, Lamisil, Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, and found them all. In one case, a single shop had everything, and the pharmacist spoke excellent English. He wrote down his prices on my paper. All the products appeared genuine – or at least consistent with what I’d seen elsewhere.

And the pharmacist, finally, was curious: What was I doing asking for all these different drugs? I confessed that I was actually looking for counterfeits. His reply? “Do you work for Pfizer?” Then he asked if I was a journalist – and I explained that I worked for a company that could detect counterfeit pills, not just packages, and was looking for test materials. Still wary, he explained that I was in the wrong neighborhood. Sham Shui Po, on Kowloon, is a good place to buy genuine medicine, he said, but if you want counterfeits, you need to go where the tourists are.

The Hong Kong resident who buys a counterfeit, he said, will come back to your shop and complain. Tourists won’t. Western tourists who are looking for a bargain shop in the dispensaries near the tourist markets (themselves full of counterfeit watches, purses, and other designer goods). Visitors from mainland China also buy counterfeits, to resell in China.

I asked how to tell which shops had counterfeits. Would they be the ones without a ‘No Fakes’ pledge or authorized dealer stickers? Not at all: if you buy even one pill legally, you get a sticker, and the rest of your inventory may not be genuine. Price is the key. The profit margin on pharmaceuticals is thin, about HK$10, a little more than a dollar. So no one will bargain much on genuine product, because they’d lose money. He suggested that I offer to buy five or six, and see if the price started to move.