DRUG MAKERS, DRUG CULTURE JOIN FORCES

Viagra sponsors funk band's tour to promote pill to baby boomers

There's the thumping, utopian music; the hordes of bliss-seeking baby
boomers; the drug that enriches all experience. The sex. It could be
the Autumn of Love, made possible by a corporate sponsor and a
prescription.

This summer, Viagra, the enormously profitable blue pill, is the
official sponsor of a concert tour by the funk band Earth, Wind &
Fire. Ads for the tour have already appeared in newspapers, including
The New York Times.

The drug culture, in other words, is making friends with the drug culture.

For popular music, as for the pharmaceutical industry, this is a
symbiosis long coming.

"At first we thought it was going to be a joke or whatever," said
Philip Bailey, one of the group's singers. "Then we sat down and
discussed the facts about men's health and erectile dysfunction. It's
not something to be ashamed of, and that's part of the message."

Besides blizzards of promotional literature, Viagra and its
manufacturer, Pfizer, will offer screening tents at concerts, where
fans can be tested for high levels of blood pressure, blood sugar and
cholesterol, all factors in male sexual problems. As part of the
sponsorship contract, the band will encourage fans to hit the tents,
but will not flog the pills from the stage.

Pfizer is "making a subtle psychological pun on the drug culture,"
said Nick Bromell, a professor of American studies at the University
of Massachusetts and author of "Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and
Psychedelics in the 1960s."

Bromell added, "Of course, they can't explicitly say, `All you who
smoked marijuana 30 years ago are now about to get another drug that
allows you to live your life more fully."'

Historically, rock concerts have been test markets for the drug
culture, places where new pharmacologies are marketed via word of
mouth to the unresisting masses. The infamous brown acid at
Woodstock, source of so many bad trips, did not make the grade. But
Ecstasy, which fueled the all-night rave parties of the early '90s,
now courses through your local high school. Drugs that enhance sexual
opportunities have always held the upper hand.

For the new drug culture, illegal drugs have been replaced by
pharmaceuticals prescribed by doctors, yet their purpose remains in
kind -- not extending life but enhancing it. As the 76 million baby
boomers bring their sense of entitlement into their declining years,
drug companies have invested heavily in quality-of-life products like
Viagra, Zoloft, Prozac and other substances that offer what used to
be called attitude adjustment.

The generation that once defined itself by its appetite for sex,
drugs and rock and roll has decided what it wants when it grows up,
and the answer is: sex, drugs and rock and roll.