Sam Seibert. Newsweek. June 22, 1998.

All over the globe, the little blue potency pill is making pharmaceutical history as the hottest new drug ever. Will sex ever be the same? Caution: This medication may cause heavy breathing and hysteria even among people who haven’t actually ingested the stuff.

Dozens of reporters and photographers packed the room. No one at the Knesset Science Committee’s meeting in Jerusalem last Tuesday could recall a session half so crowded and rambunctious. The committee’s coordinator, Anat Levy, decided not to bother issuing the usual press release summing up the proceedings. There was no need. For once, all the major local media had showed up. The topic was the sexual potency pill, Viagra. The committee’s five members heard a series of expert physicians testify on the drug’s effects and risks. The biggest attention-getter was a box of eight little blue pills brought by Dr. Ami Sidi of Wolfson Hospital near Tel Aviv. He passed them around the room to let the lawmakers and photographers have a close look. Someone in the room got a particularly close look. When the box returned to Doctor Sidi, four of the pills were missing.

Viagramania had struck again. In Israel, as almost everywhere else, the drug is making people do crazy things—even when they haven’t actually ingested it. The little blue pill is setting records as the fastest-selling, most-talked-about, most-just-about- everything-else new drug ever. U.S. doctors have scribbled out 1.7 million prescriptions since it first hit the market on March 27. The share price for Viagra’s manufacturer, Pfizer Inc., has nearly doubled since Jan. 1. Governments around the world are racing to approve the sale of Viagra quicker than any other drug ever. The public is clamoring for it, men and women, young and old. Not that they themselves need any such help with their own lovemaking, mind you. Perish the thought. But shouldn’t people who do need it—other people, that is—shouldn’t they be free to buy it? And what about the rights of those who just want some fun? There’s no law against a little honest curiosity.

Doctors emphasize that Viagra is no aphrodisiac. Still, in most nonphysicians’ terms it’s the next best thing. Basically the drug improves the circulation of blood to the groin. That makes it easier for most men to get and keep an erection. In clinical trials on men suffering from “erectile dysfunction” (the politically correct physician’s term for old-fashioned impotence), Viagra did the trick for 70 percent of the subjects who took it. “I didn’t ‘like’ Viagra,” Paulo Sant’Ana, 58, a Brazilian newspaper columnist and grandfather, told NEWSWEEK. “I loved it!” He tried the drug and described his experience in Zero Hora, his hometown daily in the southern city of Porto Alegre, just before the drug became legal in Brazil two weeks ago. “My activity was incessant, pleasurable, and above all made me proud of the sensory euphoria I was provoking in my partner,” he wrote. “You must take Viagra, which goes on sale in Brazil this week. It doesn’t matter how expensive it will be. There is no price on happiness. Viagra is the elixir of youth and happiness.”

Such raves have attracted lots of people—even men who are functionally quite erect, thanks for your concern. Underground trafficking and use are exploding despite all Pfizer’s efforts to stop them. Viagra is said to be the latest club-scene drug fad in cities like London and Taipei (it still hasn’t been legalized in either place). It increases sexual stamina, according to men who have tried it. Retired Italian football hero Stefano Tacconi, 41, told the local media that the pill helped him last twice as long as usual. Hartmut Porst, a Hamburg urologist, declared in Germany’s weekly Der Spiegel: “Almost every man who wants to be sexually active will want to try this pill.”

And women, too. Pfizer warns that no one, male or female, should take Viagra without proper medical supervision. A mistake could be fatal. Still, some women have tried it anyway, and they say the improved blood circulation can heighten sexual responsiveness. In the online magazine Salon, sex columnist Susie Bright said the drug gave her a sensation “like the most delicate, melting chocolate cream egg cracking inside [me].” A week ago The Sunday Times of London broke the news that Pfizer has been testing Viagra for use as what the Times called an “orgasm pill” for women. Other pharmaceutical companies are working on similar medicines of their own, both for men and for women. Wide availability of Viagra and its aspiring competitors might well transform society like no medicine since the Pill in the 1960s.

The little blue tablet has already knocked the world half silly. Italy is positively giddy. Viagra won’t be approved for sale in the European Union until later this year. That’s OK. Italians get a kick out of merely saying the word “Viagra.” (Pfizer’s trademark attorneys will probably crack down on the fun eventually, but right now they seem to be buried in work in the States, stopping the sale of such unauthorized stuff as blue-tinted “Viagra” sunglasses.) Restaurants all over Sicily are selling Viagra pizza, extra heavy on the hot peppers. A few weeks ago a gelateria in the town of Moneglia, near Genoa, added Viagra to its menu of homemade flavors. The customers love it, although Franco Corradi, the Bar Centrale’s owner, says he puts no drugs in his shop’s blue ice cream. (“It tastes like vanilla,” he says.) His success inspired a cheesemaker near Lake Como to market a soft white spread with the name Formaggio Viagra. And the publicity for the cheese led the owners of a Rome tavern to consider introducing a new mixed drink to be called a Viagra. The wife, an Italian, was all for it. But the husband, a Greek, said no. He didn’t want to attract more customers than the bar could comfortably seat. He was probably right.

Halfway around the world, in Hong Kong, the subject of Viagra is deadly serious. Deep in the maze of industrial alleys and truck routes known as Tsuen Wan, in western Kowloon, the local pharmacies are unusually busy these days. Tense businessmen and grandfathers sidle up to the counter asking for Wei Goh—”Brother Wei.” The code name is a Cantonese pun on the word Viagra. The shopkeepers charge as much as $77 a tablet, or roughly 10 times the going rate at some discount drug outlets in the United States. And they don’t sell to just anyone who walks in from the street. You need a referral, usually from someone in the triads, the crime syndicates that control Hong Kong’s black markets. Suppliers say they can barely keep up with orders. Everyone is looking for Brother Wei: arthritic old men, thrill-seeking kids, bored housewives who hear rumors that the pills can give multiple orgasms. Triad chemists are said to be manufacturing blue pills that look and work like the real thing. Local authorities are hoping to clear Viagra for legal distribution before the end of the year. But until then the field belongs to the criminals.

The drug is a bonanza for smugglers, drug chemists and scam artists around the world. In Bangkok, where the drug is approved but not yet available, a single pill can fetch upwards of $45. In Dublin there are rumors of dealers asking $140 each for bootleg tablets. Italian federal police recently arrested two women and a man in Naples for alleged Viagra trafficking. The law officers say the suspects had been planning to resell the drug for $200 a dose. Law enforcers say much of the supposed Viagra on the black market is fake.

In an effort to fight the illegal traffic, some countries have sped up their usual drug-approval processes. Thailand set a new record: three months from Pfizer’s initial application to legalized sales (by prescription only). Some health experts deplore such haste. They want the medical risks studied thoroughly. “Men in Israel are so stupid,” complains Dr. Orly Chen, director of a Jerusalem medical center. “They don’t give a damn about the possible side effects. They don’t even care if they die. Someone said to me, ‘I don’t care if it blinds me as long as it does the job.’ They regard Viagra as a miracle. Men don’t think.”

Not always. But they dream. The drug has created a new breed of international nomads. French and Spanish patients travel to the postage-stamp state of Andorra in the Pyrennees. Italians are flocking to the tiny border republic of San Marino, where Viagra is legal with a specialist’s prescription. The government used to require only a regular doctor’s prescription, but the six drugstores couldn’t handle all the business they got. Canada hasn’t approved Viagra yet, so Canadians get prescriptions from their doctors and drive to Vermont, where buyers pay about $10 a pill. The traffic has created a minor economic boom there.

America isn’t quite the promised land either. Californians without prescriptions can take a quick drive south to Tijuana. Mexican law requires a prescription there, too—supposedly. “You need a prescription, but we don’t make you show it to us,” explains a clerk at one local druggist’s shop. The going price per tablet in Tijuana is about $11. The champion long-distance Viagra pilgrims are a few desperate Japanese men, about two dozen in all, who recently joined a special three-night tour group to Hawaii. The total price for airfare, hotel, doctor’s consultation and two bottles of 30 tablets: $1,379.

The blue pill is not the answer for everyone. Viagra has arrived on the black market in Mumbai (Bombay) for about $25 a tablet. That’s nice for the rich. But $25 is a month’s pay for many Indians. For them the only sex medicines are still the traditional remedies they have always used, some of which are sold for as little as $1 a dose. Abdul Karim Khan, a sidewalk sex therapist in Old Delhi, says Viagra can’t touch his potions. Can Viagra make a man’s erection bigger? “I have medicines that can turn a man into a horse,” he declares with utter sincerity. Sorry about that, Pfizer.

So no drug is perfect. In South Africa, where Viagra is legal but not yet on sale, patients have already begun lining up for prescriptions. Dr. Woolf Solomon, director of a clinic in Johannesburg’s wealthy northern suburbs, says more than half his requests have come from black men—perhaps because whites are ashamed to talk about it. Of course, if a shy man is rich enough he can delegate the talking. A senior Pfizer executive in Indonesia says a few nights ago he got an urgent phone call from a man identifying himself as an official at Cendana, the Jakarta residence of former president Suharto. The caller said he wanted 100 tablets sent to his boss’s mansion immediately. The executive doubted he could help but promised to try. No need. The man called back the next day saying not to worry: “We’ve already got some coming in from the United States.”

The blue pill has clearly set loose some powerful forces. “Part of the interest in Viagra—and the historic interest in aphrodisiacs—is that everybody wishes to control love, and everybody would like to control sex,” observes Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist and author of “Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce.” The question now is just what people would do with such control. Susan Pick, a Mexico City psychologist and sex- education researcher, observes that many recreational users seem interested in nothing more than feeding their own male egos by acting out stud fantasies. At the same time, those fantasies can often focus on dreams of making a woman happy. One joke making the rounds in Mexico asks the derivation of the name Viagra. Give up? It’s short for vieja agradecida—”grateful wife.”

Even a miracle drug can’t do some things. For one, Viagra is probably not what will save the tiger, according to Karen Baragona of the World Wildlife Fund. It’s true that many Asians regard tiger penises as a sexual drug, but Baragona says the ancient and modern medicines are not in direct competition. “Tigers represent a mythical type of prowess and strength,” she explains. “Tiger penis is an aphrodisiac, remember, and not a treatment for sexual dysfunction like Viagra. A person who would be interested in that prowess wouldn’t seek it in a chemical.” On the other hand, she says, most pleasure seekers wishing to improve their sexual performance would probably take the Viagra. “And really,” she adds, “tiger-penis users are not a monolithic group.”

But let the tigers do their own worrying. There’s some exciting news for the rest of us. “One interesting side effect was that the increased blood supply to my pelvis made my chronic backache disappear,” remarked Susie Bright. “The relief was sexually inspiring all by itself.” The human race has waited thousands of years for a drug capable of shifting stiffness from the lower back to someplace more useful. Just don’t take your eye off that box.