VIAGRA HITS THE CLUB SCENE

THE DRUG dealer was in his mid-forties and introduced himself as Ian. "Want
some poke?" he asked, producing a bottle of pills from his designer jacket.
Viagra, the impotency drug, has hit the clubbing scene.

"We are making a killing out of it," the dealer told a Sunday Times
reporter. He handed over five Viagra pills - dubbed "poke" on the street -
charging UKP40 each. "I would not take them with any other stimulants," he
warned.

Dealers say that Viagra's rejuvenating effects have become regarded by male
and female clubbers as an ideal tonic to take at the end of a long night on
the town.

"The clubbing scene has always had a sexual edge and Viagra has a natural
place in that," said Ian, who claimed to be making UKP5,000 a week through
illicit sales of the drug. "Coke and Es get you sexed up, but they can also
restrict orgasm. With Viagra you don't get that."

Ian and his partner travel to America every few weeks to purchase batches
of between 200 and 300 tablets which they sell in British bars and
nightclubs with near-impunity.

"It's without the legal hassle you get with selling coke and Es. With poke
you get a slap on the wrist if you are caught. Any more than a couple of
grams of coke and you are looking at a two-year stretch," said Ian.

Last week a Sunday Times reporter approached six drug dealers in London and
Bristol asking for supplies of Viagra. All admitted to selling the drug as
well as cocaine, ecstasy, cannabis and amphetamines.

The controversial medicine, which was linked last week to 69 deaths in
America and has yet to be licensed in Britain, is being "marketed" to young
clubbers as a safe and quasi-legal addition to their already wide
repertoire of chemical stimulants.

Medical experts fear that in some cases the blue diamond-shaped tablets are
being taken as part of a potentially lethal cocktail of amphetamines and
other illegal stimulants.

Viagra is not the first medicine to be hijacked by drug dealers and, even
when licensed in Britain later this year, experts fear that the black
market could continue to develop.

One drug squad officer, who asked not to be named, compared the threat the
drug poses to the mayhem created by the sedative Valium in the late 1960s.
Then dozens of chemists' shops and doctors' surgeries were ransacked by
criminal gangs who sold pills illegally as "blues".

The illicit use of Viagra has already been added to the remit of the
government's "drug tsar", Keith Hellawell. The enforcement division of the
Medicines Control Agency has also established a special "V-squad" to tackle
the growing number of mail order companies and Internet firms now illegally
selling the pills in Britain.

In August the V-men notched up their first big bust when a stash of 90
pills with a street value of nearly UKP4,000 was discovered in a sex shop
in Soho, London. On Friday an official warning was issued about a rogue
mailshot that targeted pensioners with batches of up to 20 pills.

Viagra is expected to be made generally available on prescription in
Britain from next month. Experts say that Viagra is unlikely to be the last
medicine hijacked by drug dealers. Spurred on by the huge commercial
success of products such as Viagra and the anti-depressant Prozac,
pharmaceutical companies are dedicating increasing portions of their
research budgets to so-called "silver bullets", or lifestyle drugs.

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson