The Sunday Times - Viagra hits the club scene
August 30 1998
by Paul Nuki
and Edin Hamzic
THE DRUG dealer was in his mid-forties and introduced
himself as Ian. "Want some poke?" he asked, producing a
bottle of pills from his designer jacket. Viagra, the
impotency drug, has hit the clubbing scene.
"We are making a killing out of it," the dealer told a Sunday
Times reporter. He handed over five Viagra pills - dubbed
"poke" on the street - charging œ40 each. "I would not take
them with any other stimulants," he warned.
Dealers say that Viagra's rejuvenating effects have become
regarded by male and female clubbers as an ideal tonic to
take at the end of a long night on the town.
"The clubbing scene has always had a sexual edge and
Viagra has a natural place in that," said Ian, who claimed to
be making œ5,000 a week through illicit sales of the drug.
"Coke and Es get you sexed up, but they can also restrict
orgasm. With Viagra you don't get that."
Ian and his partner travel to America every few weeks to
purchase batches of between 200 and 300 tablets which
they sell in British bars and nightclubs with near-impunity.
"It's without the legal hassle you get with selling coke and
Es. With poke you get a slap on the wrist if you are caught.
Any more than a couple of grams of coke and you are
looking at a two-year stretch," said Ian.
Last week a Sunday Times reporter approached six drug
dealers in London and Bristol asking for supplies of
Viagra. All admitted to selling the drug as well as cocaine,
ecstasy, cannabis and amphetamines.
The controversial medicine, which was linked last week to
69 deaths in America and has yet to be licensed in Britain,
is being "marketed" to young clubbers as a safe and
quasi-legal addition to their already wide repertoire of
chemical stimulants.
Medical experts fear that in some cases the blue
diamond-shaped tablets are being taken as part of a
potentially lethal cocktail of amphetamines and other illegal
stimulants.
Viagra is not the first medicine to be hijacked by drug
dealers and, even when licensed in Britain later this year,
experts fear that the black market could continue to
develop.
One drug squad officer, who asked not to be named,
compared the threat the drug poses to the mayhem created
by the sedative Valium in the late 1960s. Then dozens of
chemists' shops and doctors' surgeries were ransacked by
criminal gangs who sold pills illegally as "blues".
The illicit use of Viagra has already been added to the
remit of the government's "drug tsar", Keith Hellawell. The
enforcement division of the Medicines Control Agency has
also established a special "V-squad" to tackle the growing
number of mail order companies and Internet firms now
illegally selling the pills in Britain.
In August the V-men notched up their first big bust when a
stash of 90 pills with a street value of nearly œ4,000 was
discovered in a sex shop in Soho, London. On Friday an
official warning was issued about a rogue mailshot that
targeted pensioners with batches of up to 20 pills.
Viagra is expected to be made generally available on
prescription in Britain from next month. Experts say that
Viagra is unlikely to be the last medicine hijacked by drug
dealers. Spurred on by the huge commercial success of
products such as Viagra and the anti-depressant Prozac,
pharmaceutical companies are dedicating increasing
portions of their research budgets to so-called "silver
bullets", or lifestyle drugs.
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