Pharmacist avoids jail for illegally advertising prescription-only Viagra

A Pharmacist from Manchester, who advertised Viagra illegally, has luckily avoided an immediate jail sentence.

Mr William Parsons advertised Viagra and other prescription medication used to treat male impotence on his website Potency.co.uk which has now been removed from the web.

Parsons, who also ran a pharmacy in the Peak District, was given a suspended nine-month jail term at London's Southwark Crown Court on Thursday after previously being convicted of three counts of advertising prescription-only medicine.

Passing sentence, Judge Peter Testar said: "This defendant has behaved in a way that he knows was illegal. That's the mischief of what he has done. He sought to defend the indefensible."

The court heard Parsons ran the website and the Hayfield Pharmacy in Derbyshire from 1999 until he sold the combined businesses and premises for just under £500,000 in 2007.

Parsons used blank prescriptions obtained from a doctor in Cyprus to prescribe the drugs himself to customers visiting the website. The site boasted "special offers" on the drugs. Kennedy Talbot, prosecuting, estimated Parsons made more than £1,000 a month from sales.

An inspector from regulatory body the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) visited the pharmacy in 2006 where the blank prescriptions were discovered. The inspector subsequently visited the website where he discovered the illegal offers.

Parsons was warned by the MHRA he would have to change his website in order to comply with the law, but the pharmacist refused.

Judge Testar said: "He carried on with the plainly illegal activity of advertising prescription only drugs. He simply decided he wasn't going to comply with the law. He thought if he carried on he wouldn't be stopped. These are regulations that are there for the protection of the public. The requirement of a prescription is there for a good reason."

The Judge said he had intended to pass an immediate custodial sentence but had decided not to as Parsons was the main provider of care for his sick wife. The nine-month sentence was suspended for two years. Parsons was also ordered to carry out 150 hours unpaid work in the community.

Bogalusa man charged in unprescribed Viagra case

A 28-year-old Bogalusa man has been charged with possession of a drug without a prescription after authorities say they seized about 1,500 Viagra tablets in a package addressed to him.

Investigators say they found an addition 150 Viagra tablets and 50 Cialis tablet after executing a search warrant in Jude Taylor's home. Both drugs are for erectile dysfunction.

Taylor was arrested Friday.

Nick Manale of the Louisiana State Police says the package with 1,500 tablets was shipped from China.

Agents from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Postal Service, Bogalusa Police Department, Washington Parish Sheriff's Office and Louisiana State Police Narcotic detectives participated in the investigation.

Information from: Bogalusa - Daily News , http://www.edailynews.info/

Viagra's discovery

Viagra's discovery


Even the fastest selling drug of all time, Viagra, is not used for what it was originally intended.
It started life as plain old UK92480, a new treatment for angina, a heart condition that constricts the vessels that supply the heart with blood.
The drug company Pfizer was looking for something that would relax these blood vessels, however its trials in people were disappointing

Pfizer were about to abandon further trials when the trial volunteers started coming back and reporting an unusual side effect - lots of erections.
Pfizer senior scientist Chris Wayman was charged with investigating what was happening. He created a model 'man' in the lab.
He took a set of test-tubes filled with an inert solution, and in each one placed a piece of penile tissue, taken from an impotent man.
Each piece of tissue was then connected up to a box that, at the flick of a switch, would send a pulse of electricity through the tissue.
Applying this current of electricity mimics what happens when a man is aroused.
The first time he did this nothing happened to the vessels. However, when he added Viagra to the tissue bath the penile blood vessels suddenly relaxed - as they would for a man to give him an erection.
He said: "What was amazing about this study was that we saw a restoration of the erectile response. Now we were on to something which could only be described as special".
Before the launch of Viagra in 1998 there was no oral treatment for erectile dysfunction, the only options were an injection or a fairly gruesome prosthetic implant.
Now, thanks to a failed Angina treatment, men had another option. Viagra is now one of the most prescribed drugs in the world.

Horizon: Pill Poppers can be seen on BBC Two on Wednesday 20 January at 9pm or afterwards via BBC iPlayer