Rush to Judgment

Rush Limbaugh's detainment at Palm Beach International Airport Monday for carrying a bottle of Viagra prescribed for someone else raises several interesting questions.

First, how do I get a job as a custom's official at PBI? What a sweet gig! I must be reading too many Carl Hiaasen novels, because I've been under the impression that Florida is simply chock full of bad guys trying to sneak into Florida to do bad things. Apparently not, since the government is cracking down on prescription drugs couriered by middle-aged millionaires.

Second, why didn't Rush simply pull a Rep. Patrick Kennedy and call in a favor with the authorities? With all the support they've received over the airwaves the past eight years, Governor Jeb Bush or his big brother President George W. Bush certainly owe Mr. Limbaugh a pardon or two. It almost seems unfair. I really don't understand the point of being rich and famous if you can't use those qualities to skirt the system.

Most importantly, why in the world is The Maharushie using Viagra? Eli Lilly's Cialis clearly provides better bang for your buck, lasting 36 hours compared to Vitamin V's four. Since these two drugs have similar efficacy rates and side effect profiles, picking one over the other should be a no-brainer. Yet, due to the superiority of Pfizer's sales force, Viagra still controls 65% of the US market. This is not the case in France, where Cialis has recently moved on top and is warmly referred to as "Le Weekend" for its long half-life. The difference in market share can be traced to sales tactics; maybe the American Pfizer reps are "counter detailing" Cialis by calling Viagra the Freedom F^ck. I certainly saw stranger things during my five years selling for Pfizer, as I chronicled in my book, "HARD SELL: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman."

The story spread swiftly, via voice mail and phone calls. District managers retold it at district meetings, giving it more strength and credibility. I never once doubted its veracity - until researching this book. I guess when you wanted to believe something badly enough, it was easy to do so.

An internist somewhere in the southeast, I think, was sitting at his office desk when a male Biaxin rep dropped by. The doc waved him in. The guy approached and tossed an object onto the desk. The physician picked it up and saw that it was a Kermit the Frog puppet. He asked what that was all about.

"Did you know, doctor, that Jim Henson was taking Zithromax for his pneumonia when he died?" The physician had not known that. "If you don't want that to happen to your patients, be sure to use Biaxin first line." Allegedly, the internist threw the rep out and barred him from the office. No matter. A line had been irrevocably crossed. Biaxin guys were dirt.

Checking some "facts" during the writing of HARD SELL, I discovered that Mr. Henson had indeed died of pneumonia, in 1990. That bothered me. Zithromax received FDA approval in 1993. The possibility existed that the Muppets' creator had been enrolled in a clinical trial for Zithromax, and had in fact died while on the drug. But those studies were normally double-blinded; meaning neither researcher nor patient knew what drug the latter was getting, thereby eliminating a potential bias in the findings. So, it would have taken a physician involved with the trial to un-blind the medication following Mr. Henson's death, see which one he had been taking and then leak that information to a Biaxin rep. All of that was possible, but it seemed farfetched.

So, either the Biaxin guy was a moronic prick who decided to make up a story and risk his career to gain business or a Pfizer district manager invented the story to fire up his sales team. Hmmm.

Shady sales tactics aside, there's plenty of business to go around in the two billion-dollar Erectile Dysfunction market. But Rush's detainment indicates a missed Cialis opportunity not only for himself, but also for Eli Lilly. The Indianapolis drug giant (in the interest of full disclosure, my employer from 2000-2005) has whiffed on a guaranteed slam dunk of a demographic for its own product, as Mr. Limbaugh's mug shot highlights: old, bald guys. Simply combine Cialis with Propecia, Merck's drug for baldness. Voila: Propecialis!

I want a cut.