What next? Viagra advocates.
Included among Brownlee’s experts are representatives from the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group that charge Pfizer with purposely excluding men with heart conditions from their clinical trials
specifically because of “safety worries.” To this accusation, Brownlee quotes Pfizer’s director of clinical trials, Ian Osterloh: “We thought [heart and high blood pressure patients] wouldn’t be thinking about sex. “93 Meanwhile, death as a side effect is something Pfizer can somehow both deny and soft - pedal. Brownlee writes, Pfizer maintains that Viagra is safe when used as directed. “I don’t think there is any evidence this drug is dangerous,” says Ian Osterloh, who directs Pfizer’s clinical trials, the tests on people that determine a drug’s safety and efficacy. The number of deaths, says Osterloh, is not unexpected considering that many of the men using Viagra are old and have failing hearts. In fact, he says, Pfizer expected more deaths. It is precisely because Viagra is being used by older, often ailing men, and because it is a sexual aid and not a lifesaving drug, that critics are questioning the speeded - up process that led to its approval.”
Perhaps what is surprising is the extent to which this phenomenon of risk taking at the expense of health is understood, condoned, and reported by the popular press. By June 1998, when the first sixteen deaths had been reported, Newsweek journalist Rana Dogar discloses in her article “Just How Safe Is Sex?” that the details of each death aren’t yet clear. … But there appear to be some common denominators. At least 13 ofthe men were reportedly over 50, the keyage for both heart attacks and Viagra use. Many suffered from ailments like heart disease or high blood pressure; some were taking medications for them.
In the New York Times) Gina Kolata defends Pfizer’s position when she writes, “Of course, patients taking nitroglycerin have serious heart disease so even if such patients died while taking Viagra, that in itself would not mean that they had died because they had taken Viagra. “96 Newsweek’s John Leland also effects a remarkably benign position when he concludes, “The risks, though, are easily inflated. . . . Most of the men who died were elderly, and 51 had other risk factors like high cholesterol, high blood pressure or diabetes. “97 The ways in which these news stories characterize the deaths that followed the ingestion of Viagra legitimizes both the response of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and the larger societal structure that grants the process of developing drugs to organizations with a primary focus on profit.
But the risks ofViagra could not be completely ignored. Death notwithstanding, these news stories had other ways to talk about the perils of the potency pill. Along with legitimizing risk, many of these news stories located illegitimate risk. In order to appease the public’s interest in safety and to demonstrate responsibility, these news stories concoct numerous scapegoats upon whose backs the burden of evil is loaded.
In his introduction to Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change) Hugh Duncan explains how the use of the scapegoat is “only a rationalization of other motives” including sexual, political, and economic motives.w In The Rhetoric of Religion) Burke differentiates between the ritualistic scapegoat and the pseudoscientific scapegoat. In ritual, the scapegoat is “delegated” insofar as the attributes in need of purgation are contrived. But for the pseu - doscientific scapegoat, negative attributes have been retroactively assigned.
These negative attributes disproportionately fall on “queer” users of Viagra. By “queer” I refer to those who, according to certain writers, ingest Viagra illegitimately - that is, those outside of the boundaries sanctioned by Pfizer, by techno scientific discourse, and even by society at large. Performance studies scholar Elizabeth Bell points out how “each culture maintains elaborate cultural constraints against and rewards for coupling in/appropriately.”loo In these news stories, those men who couple inappropriately - or, illegitimately - and are made scapegoats as a result include homosexuals, rave party drug users, and nonimpotent heterosexuals (both male and female).
