Viagra Turns 5

Early safety concerns proved baseless, and now the competition is heating up

If this story were an E-mail message, chances are you would have trashed it by now. That's because the subject is Viagra, the little blue pill that allows many otherwise impotent men to achieve erection and, not coincidentally, continues to generate a torrent of Internet spam. Hard to believe it has been almost five years since Viagra was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In that time early fears that the drug might cause nerve damage to the eye or directly trigger cardiac deaths have been laid to rest, while its status as a cultural phenomenon has grown. (The pill...

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