Or maybe take-out. That’s what an undercover operation conducted by reporters for The Times of London found recently. They pretended to set up a wholesaling business and advertised on the Internet. Lo and behold, they were contacted by Gabriel Zhang, 32, who runs Siqi Pharmceuticals, and offered to make fake pills for everything from erectile dysfunction to heart disease and cancer. And he promised perfect reproductions.

“We copy every single detail. We could produce $100 bills but we wouldn’t do that because it is illegal,” he boasted. To prove that he could produce the lifesaving drugs he provided the wholesaler with counterfeit Viagra which had been manufactured in his factory. And guess what? The Viagra turned out to contain “overdose” levels of the active ingredient. (That’s some of the ‘Viagra’ in the photo).

Based in the northern city of Tianjin, Zhang agreed to make 200,000 packs a month of three drugs for the wholesaler: Plavix, a blood thinner; Casodex, a hormone treatment for prostate cancer, and Zyprexa, the schizophrenia med. The potential profits from this trade are huge, the Times notes. The wholesale price for Casodex in the UK is about $258 for a pack of 28 pills: Zhang was offering them for about $10.

To Zhang it was the appearance rather than the contents of the drugs that mattered most. And so he visits a print shop that has a back room filled with Apple Macs. “Producing the pills themselves is relatively easy,” he told them, “but if the packaging isn’t good enough you can’t sell it for full price.”

Want to see Zhang’s factory? Take a peek at the paper’s photo gallery.

Hat tip to Drug Channels