Fake Drugs in China

I found this story very disturbing:

Chinese government authorities have detained nearly 2,000 people as part of a nationwide crackdown on the sale of fake or counterfeit drugs and health care products, according to a report Sunday from Xinhua, the official news agency.

The crackdown comes amid growing concerns about the prevalence of counterfeit drugs and tainted food supplies in China, and increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting operations. The government acknowledged Sunday that the manufacturing of fake drugs had become harder to detect.

Earlier this year, the authorities in Zhejiang Province, not far from Shanghai, discovered that hospital workers were saving old packages, including those of high-end medications, and reselling them to drug counterfeiters to refill with fake drugs. . . .

The recent crackdown comes because of concern that some of the fake treatments are leading to liver damage and even cardiac arrest.

Counterfeiting in the sense of, say, trying to pass generic drugs off as the brand name is one thing. But putting dangerous substances into drug packages strikes me as a truly evil act, and if thousands of people in China participate in such rings, many of them hospital employees, that suggests a real moral weakness. The extraordinary changes sweeping across China, along with corruption in the communist party, seem to be having dire effects on many people.