A man has been given a 10-year prison sentence for producing millions of fake anti-impotence pills.

Wang Weiping was also fined 2 million yuan (US$250,000) in a first ruling on Monday at Shaoxing Intermediate People's Court in east China's Zhejiang Province.

The 34-year-old, a legal worker at Kangdeli Health Care Co Ltd in Xinchang County of the province, was arrested in November last year on suspicion of producing and selling counterfeit drugs.

A total of 381,000 fake Viagra pills and 1.4 million counterfeit Cialis tablets, worth a combined total of 241 million yuan (US$29 million) on the market, were also seized from workshops at Kangdeli Health Care, according to a release from the court.

Viagra is produced by the New York-based Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, while Cialis is manufactured by Indianapolis-based Lilly Icos LLC. Both are well-known drugs to treat impotence.

Some of the fake pills were found to contain medical starch, which does not have any curative effect and others had too much sildenafil, the main ingredient of Viagra, and is detrimental to health in large doses, said the release.

Workshops to make the fake drugs were also found in Guannan County of Jiangsu Province, Zhejiang's neighbouring province.

All counterfeit pills, production machines and materials to make the fake drugs were confiscated.

Wang began making the fake pills in Shaoxing in April last year, and established another manufacturing base at Guannan in Jiangsu Province in June.

Local police and drug administration officials uncovered the case during a crackdown on the production of fake pills.

No counterfeit drugs have actually been found in the marketplace, said Zhang Guojing, director of the Shaoxing Food and Drug Administration.

Wang's operation is the biggest, in terms of the financial worth of the pills, to have been uncovered in Zhejiang Province.

Erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra and Cialis were approved by the Ministry of Health and State Food and Drug Administration as prescription drugs in 1999.

(China Daily May 10, 2006)