The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- June 15, 1998
Parties, Nightclubs Are Serving
As Dispensaries for Popular Viagra
By ANDREA PETERSEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When Harry Denton attended a friend's recent birthday party, he got a very up-to-date party favor: a blue-diamond tablet of Viagra. The unmarried 54-year-old nightclub owner says he popped the impotence pill right there in the San Francisco restaurant.
"I don't think I need it, but you always want more," says Mr. Denton, who credits the dose with giving him an unusually exciting evening after the party. "It was like an extra helping," he says.
Pfizer Inc.'s Viagra is supposed to be prescribed by urologists and family physicians to treat impotent men. But the hot-selling sex pill is reaching perfectly healthy men on the street -- as well as in discos and restaurants, at parties and at diet clinics-turned-pill mills. It is flooding new and sometimes illegitimate distribution channels thanks to opportunistic doctors, fad-focused entrepreneurs, Web sites, and occasionally helpful friends.
Off the Street
At the Family Walk-In Clinic, a small primary-care clinic in a Dalton, Ga., strip mall, the Viagra business is booming. Every week Jim Coone, a family physician and the clinic's owner, prescribes Viagra to dozens of men, who literally walk in off the street and ask for it. For $55, they get a cursory physical exam (to make sure they aren't taking nitroglycerin, which can have a fatal interaction with Viagra) and a prescription, good for one refill. "A lot of times they come in and get a prescription, and you never hear from them again," Dr. Coone says.
In lower Manhattan, the Better Care Health Care clinic used to specialize in chiropractic care and massage. Now it also has a man pacing the streets during rush hour wearing a three-foot-tall sandwich board that blares, "Are You A Candidate For ... VIAGRA," with a phone number.
Better Care's co-owner is Richard Simon, who previously owned a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop and a car dealership. On the side he publishes Muscle Up, a body-building magazine. "Every overworked, under-rested, middle-aged male is an ideal candidate for this drug," says the muscle-bound Mr. Simon, who isn't a physician but wears a white medical coat in the office anyway. A real doctor is there writing prescriptions.
"A lot of men refuse to approach their primary physicians for this situation, but they come to us," says Mr. Simon. "There's almost a mentality like you're sneaking around."
Placebo Effect?
Pfizer has been trying to contain the Viagra frenzy, even as the drug morphs from pharmaceutical success story into cultural phenomenon. The company stresses that Viagra should be taken only by men with "erectile dysfunction" and that it won't turn healthy men into super-studs. "If you don't have a headache and you take an aspirin, what does it do for the headache? Nothing. If you don't have erectile dysfunction and take Viagra, what does it do? Nothing," insists David Brinkley, director of Pfizer's sexual-health team. Indeed, some doctors agree: Healthy men with insatiable Viagra appetites may simply be enjoying a placebo effect, they say.
Pfizer can't afford to let Viagra turn into the next hot party drug: Recreational use of Viagra could easily turn into a public-relations disaster. But the company has been hard-pressed to crack down on promiscuous prescribers -- it lacks any authority to do so -- or to prevent Viagra from being used by healthy men in search of a sexual boost. And the Food and Drug Administration, which approves new drugs for market, doesn't regulate how or to whom doctors prescribe drugs after approval.
"We have and continue to recommend it be used only for a diagnosed medical condition," says Pfizer spokesman Andrew McCormick.
Still, many men who say they aren't impotent rave about Viagra's powers. They say it makes them "better" at sex and increases the duration and frequency of their erections. Whether that is an improvement in their partners' eyes is another matter. At a recent New York party, Sabina Broadhead, a 30-year-old nursing student, lamented the idea of Viagra-enhanced men, declaring, "I am not a gym."
Demand among healthy men is feeding a black market in the little blue pill. Newspaper ads tout the "Miracle Pill" and benefits way beyond the narrow treatment of impotency. Park Avenue Medical Care advertises in Manhattan's Village Voice weekly newspaper that it dispenses Viagra prescriptions to treat "premature reaction" and "orgasm failure" -- maladies that aren't mentioned on the Viagra package insert.
'We Deliver'
In another ad, Jack Berall's "Viagra Consultation Service," promises, "We deliver." Does he ever: He makes house calls. Dr. Berall, who advertises his medical services on the Web but doesn't have a consultation office, says he visits patients in their offices and homes. He says he has prescribed the drug to about 50 men who aren't impotent but just looking for a lift.
"I'm basically treating men who are missing their youth a bit," Dr. Berall says. "He's got the money, the cars, the boat, but all of a sudden he doesn't have what a 25-year-old has." Dr. Berall says he has taken Viagra five times even though he doesn't have any erection problems. "Those nights were good nights," he says.
Viagra customers can get home delivery in other ways. On-line hawkers are out in force, even though a doctor operating an early Internet Web site, www.penispill.com, came under pressure from the Wisconsin Medical Examining Board. (The address now leads to a site featuring "Hot Girls from Russia" and other fare.) Another site selling Viagra identifies itself as part of a Las Vegas clinic called Focus Medical Group. It dispenses the drug to patients sight-unseen for $10 a pill (at www.focus-medical.com). The "online consultation" costs $85, even if it doesn't result in a prescription. The group, which shares a president and a telephone receptionist with Las Vegas diet clinic Trimline Medical Center, didn't return repeated phone calls.
Bad Side Effects
The fly-by-night nature of some Viagra shops could be cause for concern. There have been 16 reported deaths among Viagra users, including several cardiac patients who died of heart attack or stroke. Viagra's reported side effects include headaches, flushing of the face and blue-tinged vision. But few if any medical authority thinks Viagra is dangerous to healthy men: With 1.7 million taking the drug, a far higher casualty count would have emerged by now if Viagra were causing harm, doctors say.
And even for healthy men, Viagra might be doing some good, some doctors say. "This drug is a benefit for a lot of people. By boosting their sexual function, they are boosting their self-esteem and making themselves feel better," says Michael Rendel, a New York internal medicine and infectious-disease doctor. Adds John W. Weigel, a urologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., "Why deny somebody who wants to improve on a basic sort of pleasure? It isn't damaging anybody."
Brad Moyer, a 29-year-old computer programmer in New York, was at the Limelight nightclub late one night recently where pals were passing around Viagra pills like marijuana joints. He says he declined. "I thought it was annoying, like Rollerblading," he says. "Everyone is doing it because everyone else is doing it."
In San Francisco, 45-year-old artist Jono Weiss is doing his part. He got a Viagra prescription from his doctor and gave it a try. "It was like being 16 again," he says. Mr. Weiss was so blown away by his prowess that he sent Viagra fan mail to his friends. "I have three words for you," one note read. "VI-AG-RA."
Fernando Gomes, manager of the chic New York bar Ciel Rouge, received a bottle of 20 100-milligram pills for his 34th birthday from a friend who is a nurse. "He wrapped it up with a little bow on it," Mr. Gomes says. "I'm too much of an adventurer to let it gather dust" he says. "I'm just waiting for the right occasion."
-- Nancy Ann Jeffrey contributed to this article.
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