Fake Viagra not the way to a good time

A little diamond-shaped blue pill has brought a new lease on life for many men -- and their partners -- since it was launched two years ago. But Viagra's phenomenal success in treating erectile dysfunction has inevitably drawn con artists who are touting fake products as aphrodisiacs on Jakarta's streets. The Jakarta Post's Bruce Emond and Maria Endah Hulupi look at the business of selling a good time.

JAKARTA (JP): As the setting sun basks the city in a flickering glow, droves of medicine hawkers emerge from their daytime cocoons to set up shop for a busy night ahead.

They park their loaded pushcarts at distances of a few meters from each other in areas such as Bendungan Hilir, Jl. Pramuka and Senen, Central Jakarta, Jatinegara market, East Jakarta, and Daan Mogot, West Jakarta.

But their happiest hunting ground is in the entertainment belt of Jl. Gajah Mada and Jl. Hayam Wuruk in the city's Chinatown. The area's discos, nightclubs, restaurants and hotels pulsate with life until the sun comes up.

All that partying can take its toll, and the medicine hawkers are at the ready with over-the-counter and prescription drugs, toiletries and condoms.

For those who need some oomph after a long night of living it up, there are also aphrodisiacs.

And the big seller these days is Viagra -- or what passes for it.

"Aris," who operates outside a high school in the area, offers a whole range of "Viagra" products, from pills to capsules to sprays.

"This is the best grade and costs Rp 135,000 each," he said as he took a grayish-blue tablet out of a box. The "second" grade, which he got from another vendor, was placed in a small blue-and- white box marked Pfizer, the manufacturer of Viagra, with a hologram and batch number on the cover.

Cheapest of all are his capsules, with a box of six selling for Rp 25,000, and spray oil for Rp 40,000. Their crude packaging, the garbled English of their pamphlets and the inclusion of a pornographic game card were enough to give them away as fakes.

Aris said the products were supplied by a dealer who was on "standby" in the area during the night for whenever the hawkers ran out of the drugs.

Despite the higher price, the "top grade" pills, Aris said, were the best seller among his customers, who he described as well-off "working people".

Genuine

To the layperson, it would be hard to tell the difference between the blue-and-white Viagra packaging sold by Aris and the genuine article.

But Shanti Shamdasani, senior public affairs manager for PT Pfizer Indonesia, has seen it all before: The "Pfizer" in the hologram is slightly the wrong shape, the bar code is upside down and the Viagra logo is missing.

The "top grade" pill, tested in the company's laboratory in Bogor, turned out to contain about 60 percent sildenafil citrate, the active ingredient in Viagra (the inside of a genuine Viagra pill is white, while a fake pill is usually blue).

There was no reason to take a second look at the capsules and spray oil, because Viagra is only produced in pill form. The capsule contained a brownish powder which the lab was unable to identify.

"In the past we've found capsules containing vitamin B and others filled with Johnson's baby powder, which obviously people should not be ingesting," Shanti said.

Yet it is little wonder that Viagra, which costs about Rp 95,000 per 100 mg pill at pharmacies, is a prime target for counterfeiters.

The Index of Medical Specialties, a medical consultancy on the pharmaceutical industry in the country, reports it is now the most commonly prescribed drug in Indonesia for erectile dysfunction, used in treating men with causes either physiological, such as constricted blood flow to the genitals from diabetes, hypertension or other conditions, or psychological, such as depression.

What concerns Pfizer is how the drug has become considered a miraculous cure-all for whatever ails you in the bedroom -- and a party drug to put someone in the mood.

With an explosion in illegal drug use in the 1990s combined with the traditional practice of self-medication and using aphrodisiacs, such as jamu (herbal concoctions), and poor consumer education, the country has proved a fertile ground for the proliferation of fake Viagra, as well as the genuine product being sold illegally on the black market. Apart from street hawkers, they are reportedly being offered in bars, discos, cafes, fitness centers, even on golf courses for men at the end of a round on the links.

"We've even heard of salesgirls going around the city offering it to men, and of executives bidding on a tender who offer a Viagra and a woman to officials making the decision," Shanti said.

When the drug is advertised, either directly or through euphemistic terms of "the magic blue pill" and "V", the firm takes the action of formally informing the media involved that Viagra is only available by prescription and that its advertisement is thus illegal.

But Shanti acknowledged the firm had limited success working with the police in stopping the sale of fake Viagra, most of which is believed to originate in Australia and New Zealand.

Now Pfizer is taking its message to the public, including through seminars, as it tries to educate people that consuming fake Viagra has the potential to hurt their health and pocketbook.

"Viagra is not an aphrodisiac, and it won't work on systems that don't need it. And we're concerned that people will become ill from using the fake drugs, which will mean they are spending money on something they don't need -- and then will have to spend more on their recovery."