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It's no joke: Viagra is sponsoring concert tour
© St. Petersburg Times, I'm just the tiniest bit scared by the information that drugs, or at least a drug, will be heavily promoted at an upcoming tour by 1970s funk band Earth Wind & Fire this fall. No, not ecstasy. Not "Special-K." Not the devil of the week, oxycodone. Not cocaine in any form, not heroin, not pot and not even nitrous oxide. Viagra. The summer-of-love generation at last meets the new drug culture, at a time when most of us who made the transition from being flower children to wearing leisure suits have finally allowed sexual dysfunction (along with just about every other cultural reality) to come out of the closet. I have to admit, when I first saw a New York Times story about the combination of erectile dysfunction wonder drug and the band that includes in its list of gold singles both Can't Hide Love and (I'm not kidding) After the Love is Gone, I thought my satirical cheap-shot cup had runneth over. And I am relatively protected in making Viagra jokes because I am a well-known and open user of the drug that the pharmaceutical company says the band will not be, er, flogging, onstage at its concerts. If it wasn't for my very strongly held belief that straight white men should never dance in public, I'd be at every concert and living it up. I already was under treatment for erectile dysfunction when my new best friends at Pfizer came out with Viagra in 1998. Without going into detail, I can tell you that the methods of administering other drugs made a little diamond-shaped blue pill a very attractive means of dealing with the situation. My bosses at the Times asked me if I would be willing to go public with a firsthand account of my experiences in a story that would run on the front page of the Floridian section, and I, always willing to leap humbly into the breach and make the ultimate sacrifice for my company, agreed to. Many (although nobody who knew me well) were amazed that I would discuss so personal a matter in a venue that public. Granted, the condition itself wasn't something I chose to advertise, but I saw absolutely nothing wrong with advertising that the problem had been overcome. And, besides, one of the biggest problems with the treatment of sexual dysfunction has been the unwillingness of some men to admit that they have a problem and seek the treatment that has now changed so many lives. I figured that going public might make it a little easier on some guys, and, I was told later, it did. Seems to me like the Virginia Slims tennis series was probably the first, but big business has gotten so much into plastering its products' names on everything from race cars (and yes, Viagra has one) to athletic stadiums, that it was only a matter of time until rock concerts would join the very profitable game. At least my band of choice, the Grateful Dead, broke up before it wound up being sponsored by Agent Orange. I think the Viagra concerts are a great idea, and, more important, they plan on having screenings at the concerts for some of the health problems of which impotence can be a symptom. In my case, one of those screenings discovered a life-threatening condition that could have killed me within a year and had been missed by my physician. Calling attention to a health problem and screening for other potential problems in conjunction with good music sounds like a win-win situation to me. Still in all, there are a lot of easy joke lines to use in a column like this, and I am proud to say that I have avoided nearly all of them. (I had to. Most of them wouldn't have gotten past some of my more fastidious editors, anyhow.) And at least this is one drug that isn't likely to be abused at the concerts. More is not necessarily better with Viagra, and the biggest risk is people who might, against medical advice, combine it with other medications such as nitroglycerine. And I don't think chopping it up and snorting it will make it any more effective. You're more likely to wind up with just a blue nose and a stiff neck.
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