By EmilyM

Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether you are getting the real thing or some potentially dangerous knock-off when you order medication online.

In an industry that is overwhelmingly filled with scam artists, it’s a bit of an uphill battle to stand out when you are one of the few legit pharmacies prescribing medication online. This is especially true when you are dealing with erectile dysfunction medications like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra, since these are the most frequently targeted. Just take one look in the spam folder of your email if you need further proof. Illegal pharmacies are everywhere and they are sure putting up one heck of a fight to stay in the game.

Many people do not realize the dangers of buying “generic” erectile dysfunction medications. It’s easy to be deceived when these counterfeits are priced well below the actual manufacturer’s price. But like many things, when it seems “too good to be true,” generally it just may be.

Currently there are no FDA approved generic versions of these on the market. This too may change over time as the product’s manufacturers eventually lose their patents, but for now there are no exceptions. What many of these pharmacies do is illegal and unquestionably immoral.

While some of the pills peddled as “the real thing” turn out to have at least some of the active ingredient in Viagra, Sildenafil, it’s usually in the wrong amount or wrong form if it is even there at all. Tests have revealed that many fakes are made up of things like road paint, cement dust and chalk and are usually manufactured in dirty warehouses, not medical labs. These factories and warehouses typically make other, unrelated products all day and then simply switch over to the illegal pill production at night. This is why there have been plenty of strange ingredients discovered; it is often leftover from the making of construction materials and household products.

Fortunately, however, it appears that even more of these fraudulent operations are beginning to make their way to the news and this is hopefully starting to shed some light on one very shady illegal industry.

Just a few weeks ago, a huge drug bust in Dubai took place when a customs team discovered nearly 7 million fake Viagra pills. This may sound like no real threat to American customers, but places like Dubai are often the holding area for many criminal shipping rings. These fake and potentially dangerous pills stay in these holding areas before making their way to U.S. medicine cabinets. Consumers continue to purchase these fraudulent pills unknowingly online.

A second bust was even more shocking. For the first time ever in the pharmacy/wholesale supply chain in Australia, fake Viagra somehow leaked in. The product was deceivingly labeled as 100 mg Pfizer Viagra in packs of four. Since these were showing up in legitimate supplies at pharmacies, it was not immediately known or even suspected that they could be fake. As a precaution, pharmacists in Australia have been advised to pull their stock of Viagra matching the batch number. There have been around 800 packs intercepted so far. It comes as quite a shock for the people in Australia since there has never been a known problem of counterfeit pill production there. Any fake pills that have been confiscated in the past had been brought in illegally through websites that shipped from other countries.

The problem is simply getting out of hand and fortunately many illegal rings are being broken up. It truly pays to do the research before jumping on the discount pills that litter the Web. When pills are bought illegally, the only people who benefit are unfortunately the criminals who keep producing them.