Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18834

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Edwards J
Blue Light Special: Viagra -- and Its Risks -- Now Available Without Rx in U.K. Supermarkets
BNet 2010 Sep 27
http://www.bnet.com/blog/drug-business/blue-light-special-viagra-8212-and-its-risks-8212-now-available-without-rx-in-uk-supermarkets/5875

Full text:

The U.K.’s Tesco supermarket chain will sell Viagra without a prescription, starting the kind of price war that Pfizer (PFE) until now has been keen to avoid. It also places Tesco in a conflict of interest that could damage patients’ health.

Pfizer’s previous strategy is to only raise, not lower, the price of the drug, which begins to lose its patent rights – and therefore market exclusivity – in 2012.* (Pfizer believes it has a “use” patent that keeps it exclusive through 2019, a spokesperson says.) The continual hikes have turned Viagra into a $500 million-per-quarter franchise.

At Tesco, however, men without a prescription will fill out a screening form for high blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol, which will be checked by a pharmacist. Men will then be offered a pack of eight pills for £52. The supermarket’s spokesman Shona Scott said:

Tesco will be the cheapest service in the country for those who don’t have a private prescription from their GP [general practitioner].

At the moment only Boots offer a similar service – for which they charge £55 for just four tablets.

Customers at Boots – a main street pharmacy – pay £57.43 for eight tablets after the first prescription, still slightly more than Tesco. Pfizer has previously been coy about whether it wants Viagra to get OTC, or non-prescription, status. Today the company told BNET it was not involved:

Pfizer is not involved in the set up of this initiative. The Patient Group Direction is a Tesco initiative, and the decision to implement it was made by Tesco independently of Pfizer.

The European Medicines Authority banned the sale of Viagra without a prescription in 2008, so presumably Tesco has a doctor on site signing off on the screening forms. That means the same Tesco staff who are responsible for increasing drug sales at the chain are now also judging whether Viagra is appropriate for each patient. If a patient who is already taking nitrates for blood pressure takes Viagra, the combination of the two can bring on a heart attack. Some doctors already wonder how thorough Tesco’s patient exams will be before the scrip is dispensed.

*This post was updated to reflect Pfizer’s statement that the expiration of its “composition of matter” patent in 2012 will not lead to generic competition until the “use” patent expires in 2019.