The Empire (Pfizer) Strikes Back
At the beginning of this century and for many years since, to deter online Viagra sales that undermine Pfizer’s business model, the company has funded many “public education” campaigns, some operated by “non-profit” organizations that were essentially created by drug companies; used private investigators; and lobbied and contributed money to politicians. Its campaigns were not all bad, but only to the extent that they fought against dangerous counterfeit drug peddlers and rogue online pharmacies. Sadly, Pfizer’s efforts developed into what I believe was and remains a propagandist campaign that has simply scared and continues to scare patients away from not just Viagra, but essential medicines sold online internationally that help Americans and patients worldwide afford treatments that are out of reach domestically.
The key to Pfizer’s efforts was making sure to disseminate information to the public that showed online purchases of lower-cost or generic versions of Viagra from abroad were dangerous. As part of that work, Pfizer funded research exploring the dangers of counterfeit drugs sold online. But, according to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), such research was conditioned upon an agreement that the results would only be made public if the Viagra orders turned out to be bad:
“Pfizer said they wanted to work with us on this project as long as they had the right to shut the thing down if it turned out the drugs were real…I told them that we’re big on academic freedom and that we wouldn’t be able to live with that condition…I told him that we’d want to be able to say, for example, ‘Okay, so in 25 percent of pharmacy orders we got, we got the real thing.’ They said, ‘No, no, you can’t do that. We only want you to publish about the fake pills.’”
Among its efforts to shape the public message about online Viagra and prescription drug sales overall, Pfizer funded a program of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) called the Internet Drug Outlet Identification Program, which places certain online pharmacies on a Not Recommended List. Sure enough, that list of about 13,000 contains many really bad, no prescription requirement, untrustworthy rogue sites — even some that sell addictive prescription drugs without requiring a prescription. But it also includes licensed Canadian pharmacies, not to mention most, if not all, PharmacyChecker-accredited international online pharmacies. Taking it a step further, NABP has placed our company website — PharmacyChecker.com — on that list. We have sued them. That’s right: Big Pharma doesn’t like us either.
Pfizer, along with other drug companies (Eli Lilly, Merck, and others), funded the NABP’s campaign to operate .Pharmacy (think dot com, dot org, but in this case dot pharmacy). How might this help Pfizer? In its operation of this program, the NABP excludes any online pharmacy, for example, that sells Viagra internationally to a customer in the United States from obtaining the .Pharmacy registration. The NABP, along with other groups funded by drug companies, such as the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, then “educates” the public that websites with .Pharmacy at the end (such as www.walgreens.pharmacy, www.cvs.pharmacy, etc.) are trustworthy and safe, whereas those that are not eligible for .Pharmacy, including any safe international online pharmacy that sells prescription drugs to patients in the U.S., should not be trusted. You can see those drug-company-funded efforts in action here.
In 2013, Pfizer actually hopped on the “if you can’t beat them, join them” bandwagon by deciding to sell Viagra online itself. Can a drug company do that? Drug companies are not pharmacies. The answer is yes, because they can team up with a pharmacy — and in this case, Pfizer teamed up with CVS. The public relations conducted as part of Pfizer’s decision to sell Viagra online aligned with the same objectives for funding the NABP’s programs mentioned above: Present it to the public as two choices:
1) Buy expensive brand name Viagra in the U.S.; or
2) Die from counterfeit drugs sold on the online black market.
Sure enough, the headline in the New York Times was: “Facing Black Market, Pfizer Is Looking Online to Sell Viagra.” That article reports that Pfizer may be losing hundreds of millions of dollars “to a prolific black market of online pharmacies that cater to men too embarrassed to buy the drug through traditional means.” The article briefly explains that people also buy real Viagra online from licensed pharmacies in Canada and other countries that require legitimate prescriptions. It included an interview with Roger Bate, whose research has demonstrated the safety of properly credentialed international online pharmacies — including those accredited by PharmacyChecker. However, Pfizer’s PR people were probably pleased with the article, which quotes its personnel in glowing terms as saving the world from counterfeit drugs.
Pfizer’s own online pharmacy site’s main claim was that you can buy “real” Viagra. Apparently, it didn’t work out so well since the Pfizer online pharmacy page is gone. See this link to see what that page looked like.
Indian Generic Viagra: Very Real and Very Cheap
In terms of men looking for affordable Viagra, the emergence of a generic version sold online was a saving grace. Due to its different patent laws, lawful and genuine generic Viagra was manufactured and sold in India as early as 2001. Soon thereafter, it was sold over the Internet and internationally. When brand name Viagra was selling for as little as $15/pill in the U.S., generic sildenafil citrate was going for not much more than $1/pill. Pfizer wanted Americans and people in other high-income countries to view these generic versions as fake, counterfeit, or bad by definition. But they were and are not.
In terms of public health, there’s a big difference in selling counterfeit Viagra vs. real, regulated sildenafil citrate, such as the generic versions approved for sale in India. Today, many, if not most, of the FDA-approved generic Viagra that you can buy at your local CVS, Walgreens, or Walmart are manufactured by Indian drug companies.
Go USA for the Cheapest Generic Viagra Today
With Viagra now off-patent for four years in the U.S., and many generic manufacturers selling FDA-approved versions, generic Viagra is now barely $1/pill with a discount card at local U.S. pharmacies. So, there’s no need to buy Canadian, or Indian when it comes to generic Viagra.
For more of the story, see: The History of Buying Viagra Online: In Pfizer We Don’t Trust
