The Great (but Fading) Cialis-Viagra Mirage

When Viagra, Cialis etc. first hit the market, sales instantly skyrocketed.  Here was a "Magic Pill" and suddenly a problem that nobody realized was endemic was being "solved" by Big Pharma.  Doctors, Psychologists and the media speculated that "ED" was just "one of those things people didn't talk about" and was a much, much larger issue than anyone had imagined, based on the sale of these awesome new drugs.

Then something funny started to happen.  Sales of Viagra and Cialis leveled off, and began to decline.  More and more men failed to bring their prescriptions in for refills.  What was up (no really really bad pun intended?)

Here's the speculation, which I suspect is one hundred percent accurate:  When Viagra and Cialis were introduced, they were marketed as drugs which made Life After Fifty Worth Living.  Their actual medical purpose was blurred in favor of a fantasy- it wasn't really about having sex.  It was the Purple Pill of Youth.  At some point, the men taking this stuff realize that it doesn't actually turn them back into supercharged 18-year old sexual monsters, and the appeal drops off pretty dramatically. (I suspect that meds for "Low T" are currently popular for the same reason, and will soon suffer the same fate.)  A lot of men bought in to this medications not because they have a physical "problem in the bedroom" (to use the twee language) but because they thought it would actually make them look at their sexual partners differently.  When that didn't happen (even when she wore her old college sweater, or rode a bicycle, or insisted on getting her photo taken in a booth or any of the other things that according to the ads are supposed to stimulate sexual urges) they started to wonder "why am I shelling out big bucks for this snake oil?"

Simply put:  Cialis and Viagra are designed to help people who already want to have sex have sex.  But millions of men bought them thinking that they were designed to help people who don't want to have sex, have sex.   When they still didn't feel any strong physical attraction for the aging woman they'd been with for twenty years, they became disappointed and felt cheated- and tossed the empty pill container in the trash.

Thing is, I bet ED is an actual medical condition and medications designed to alleviate it are a godsend to actual victims.  But the makers of these drugs didn't become filthy rich selling them to 40 million ED patients, sorry.  They got rich selling the idea that taking a purple pill would make men see past the wrinkles and sags and envision  the hot little honey they fell in lust with back in the 80s.  Which is kind of dumb when you think about it, considering that right down the street there are stores with unlimited supplies of whisky, all available without a prescription.