Nice little blurb on ZONA new pill being given away in Mexico in this piece.
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Easy Money: Going South of the Border in Search of the Blue High
By Jesse Eisinger
Staff Reporter
6/5/98 2:29 PM ET
TIJUANA, Mexico -- It was just three of us, going down to Mexico to score drugs.
We passed the yellow diamond sign with a pictogram of a family of three, two parents racing low to the ground dragging a rag-doll child in tow. Caution: Illegal Immigrant Crossing. We passed a sign that read: Last Exit in the USA. Into Tijuana, leaving behind plasticine San Diego, that urban biosphere made safe for suburbanites.
No more carefully tailored evergreens lining aqua reflecting pools. No more impatient moments at the street corner, waiting with a clutch of others for the "Walk" sign. Here jaywalking is required. The weight of San Diego's neighborliness lifts when you enter sprawling Tijuana, where buildings and streets overlap like sheaves of aluminum siding. There are no harping billboards that caution against smoking with ingratiating jokes, like the silhouetted cowboy who says to his companion, "I miss my lung, Bob." No more billboards to warn you, as they have in San Diego: "Having sex with a minor is a major crime."
We were here to score Pfizer's (PFE:NYSE) Viagra on the black market.
This was no hedonistic road trip, however. This brief foray into gonzo journalism had a distinct '90s twist. It was an adventure in service of Wall Street. It was Bishop*, a financial journalist for a major newspaper, and Griffin*, a hedge fund manager who's shorting Viagra rivals Zonagen (ZONA:Nasdaq) and Macrochem (MCHM:Nasdaq), and me, a willing would-be guinea pig to answer the question: Would the miracle pill work on a perfectly healthy young man?
We double-parked on Calle Tercera, the main drag in El Centro, looking for a Farmacia. The newsstand was promising: the headline on the weekly newspaper Zeta blared: "Viagra en Tijuana." We had landed in the drug store district it seemed. Farmacias surrounded us.
We started slow. And very quickly we found out es muy facil to buy Viagra in Tijuana. No prescription necessary. Hey, no approval necessary either. (It was approved in Mexico late last week, but hasn't been launched.) The first drug store, Farmacia Victor, told us they would have it "Manana," that overused word in Latin America that can mean anything from later to not if you were the last customer on earth. This time the answer seemed closer to the former meaning. We were told the pills would cost us 90 pesos, or about 20 bucks each. Griffin prodded me to ask about Zetamax, the Mexican name for Zonagen's Vasomax, which was approved last week and supposed to be in stores by now. "Manana," we were assured. The pharmacist showed us a marketing flier that indicated they were going to offer a "Buy One, Get Three Free" Z-Max pill sale. They were selling the Max for 10 bucks a pill.
Griffin had to have that sheet. "Can you believe this? It's baaad to give away your drug just as you launch it," the short-seller said gleefully, betraying an urgency that revealed the pain the Zonagen shorts have felt in recent weeks. We asked for a copy. We begged to photocopy the sheet, but the guys in the pharmacy had become suspicious and turned us down.
The next drug store didn't have it, but they looked at us knowingly and steered us to Farmacia D'Lux. There I pounded out my request in pidgin Spanish for a third time. I didn't need to know the translation for "impotent." These guys knew about Viagra. The pharmacist eyed us and then looked at his companion to get a silent okay. We felt like a cross between teenagers in Washington Square Park and Ugly Americans on the Left Bank trying to order in a three-star restaurant. There was a pause and then they said, yes, they had the magic blue pills.
Rito Armando was our man, for $20 a pill. "Por la potencia," Rito said nodding. We each bought two. They brought out the bottles, already opened. There are a lot of mimics of U.S. drugs on the Mexican market, but I looked over the bottle and it seemed like The Real Thing. (Too bad that ad line is already taken.) The seal was broken and the label was still on the bottle, unread. Rito spilled six pills onto the counter. He carefully wrapped two each in three tissue parcels, but not before each tablet was well handled. Considerations of hygiene had clearly taken a back seat. We gave over our 40 bucks each and held our little packages giggling.
We asked Rito if a lot of people were buying. "Oh yes," he said, chuckling, "The men say it works, and the women say the results are sensational." Rito recommended taking the pill with Vivioptal, a big pill with over 25 vitamins and minerals. Had Rito taken it? "I don't need it -- yet," he said. Griffin took snapshots of Bishop and me, holding up the bottles with our thumbs suggestively up. Triumph.
Griffin wanted to go back to get the flier. Bishop gave me five bucks to bribe the Farmacia Victor guy to photocopy it. But, by this time, he was certain I was some strange pervert. He turned my bribe down and firmly denied my request. I skulked away.
Having scored, we wandered from drug store to drug store, doing our comparison shopping post-hoc. Three of six had Viagra and said Z-Max was coming. All offered pills for slightly less than what we paid. We realized that Rito had seen us coming. One pharmacist said that mostly it was Americans and Canadians who were buying.
We drove back to the border as easily as we had come. The border guard stopped us and asked us the purpose of our visit. "Oh, we just went down for lunch," we said. He made Bishop get out of the car and open the trunk, playing the hardass. "Did you bring any fruits, vegetables ... medicines?" he asked through his ChiPs sunglasses. "Nope," said Bishop.
Back in the U.S., conversation turned to whether we'd use the drug. We were dogs running after cars. Now that we'd caught one, we had no idea what to do with it.
As I touched down back in New York, I had a flash of inspiration. I would make a present of one of my pills to another hedge fund manager friend. Thursday evening was his bachelor party, and I was sure he would need something to combat the malign effects of alcohol. I delved into my toiletry bag and tried to unwrap my package. Alas, the tissue and the pills had melded mysteriously on the flight. My drugs were unrecognizable. I stared at the defeated little blue footballs and thought, "I guess I'll expense the 40 bucks."
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