Young, rich and brimming with energy, Eric Chang embodies the business spirit of modern China. He sits grinning broadly at his desk, beneath a cabinet stocked full of spirits and cigars, which he dispenses liberally to overseas clients, while secretaries totter in and out carrying samples and price lists.
Chang wears designer clothes, deals in multimillion-dollar orders, drives an imported Buick SUV and flies around the world to represent his company at trade shows. In fact, he works such long hours his wife complains that he treats their luxury villa 'like a hotel'.
But for all his infectious charm as he chats and jokes in succinct English in his office, in an upmarket Shanghai apartment block, there is a sinister side to the business that has made this enterprising chemistry graduate conspicuously wealthy at the age of 35. The rapidly expanding company he heads produces new forms of designer drugs and supplies hundreds of thousands of youngsters overseas with legal - and, in some cases, lethal - highs.
With a laboratory near Pudong International Airport and a factory with 65 workers three hours' drive from Shanghai, Chang's company manufactures and ships hundreds of kilograms of drugs such as mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) to Europe and elsewhere each week. And while some countries rush through legislation to outlaw his products, Chang and businessmen like him are one step ahead - preparing drugs that will bypass classifications and continue to offer profitable and legal teenage kicks.
Mephedrone first surfaced in 2007 and is one of a family of new designer drugs that is sold under the guise of 'plant food' and 'research chemicals'. Legislation has been rushed in to ban it in Australia, Sweden, Germany and Britain, where a number of deaths linked to use of the drug have been reported.
In a case last year in Australia, federal police seized 20kg of mephedrone and authorities said they were aware of a Hong Kong-based buy-and-sell website where Australians had left advertisements looking for the drug.