Michael Douglas Admits to Takeing Viagra and Thank Goodness for it

The exact quote was subtler, spoken during musings about his life with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Some wonderful enhancements have happened in the last few years - like Viagra.

This was a man transformed, waxing poetic on the joys of fatherhood the second time around, that special feeling of knowing his was the “first face” his children see when they wake up and that sweet satisfaction from helping them get ready for school.

It could be argued that this new persona would never have existed but for the aforementioned Viagra.

At the very least, it seems to have played a role not only in fulfilling a marriage but also in the birth of the two children who turned the Hollywood playboy into a sentimental Mr. Mom.

With media images abounding these days of virile older men — Hugh Hefner, 85, and Crystal Harris, 25, announcing their engagement; 80-year-old Rupert Murdoch with his elementary-school-aged daughters; the 74-year-old Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and that 18-year-old party girl — one has to wonder if Viagra has again worked its magic.

And now we have evidence that 54-year-old Osama bin Laden had Viagra in his medicine chest at the compound where he was hiding out with multiple wives.

All of this raises the question of just what the far-reaching implications of Viagra are, beyond the specific medical achievement of providing a treatment, in the form of increased blood flow, for millions of men with erectile dysfunction.

More than any pill ever to be dispensed, Viagra has played to the yearnings of American culture: eternal youth, sexual prowess, not to mention the longing for an easy fix.

From the first announcement of the existence of Viagra, fantasies went into overdrive; with the popping of a pill, lackluster marriages would be repaired.

Or a generation of newly virile men would be on the make, hooking up with younger partners, maybe even getting a chance at righting any wrongs they had committed as fathers of young children years earlier. At the very least, everyone would be having great sex well into their twilight years.

It hasn’t worked out quite that way. Thirteen years after Viagra hit the market like a bolt of lightning (Dr. Jed Kaminetsky, a New York University urologist, said that at first he was so besieged with requests for prescriptions that he had to start seeing patients on weekends to keep up with the demand), we have not turned into a Viagra-Nation.

Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, said that it has been prescribed to more than 35 million men worldwide. For many men, it has been a wonder drug, doctors like Dr. Kaminetsky agree.

But recently the market for Viagra has stalled in the United States.

Last year the total number of prescriptions for so-called ED drugs declined by 5 percent in the United States after growing just 1 percent annually the previous four years, according to IMS Health, a heath-care data and consulting firm. (Viagra prescriptions were off 7 percent; those for Levitra plummeted 18 percent.). The drop seems all the more significant given that the population is aging, so there are surely more men who potentially need the drug.

There could be many reasons for the dip: effectiveness (Viagra doesn’t work for everyone) or insurance payments, to name a few.

But another number is perhaps more telling: doctors widely observe that 40 to 50 percent of men who are given a first prescription for Viagra do not end up refilling it.

Perhaps the mentality is, as Dr. Kaminetsky suggested: “Having that blue pill is sort of like when they were kids but they walked around with a condom in their wallet: they may never have sex but they were ready.”

Abraham Morgentaler, the director of Men’s Health Boston and author of the book “The Viagra Myth,” said he was startled by the expectations that people initially poured into one little pill of Viagra.

It became, at least subconsciously, a panacea for all that was missing in their life. “Men look to Viagra as a savior for other aspects of their lives where things are not going well,” he said.

But there’s only so much increased blood flow can do. Dr. Morgentaler cited two patients, one who stopped using Viagra shortly after he began and one who never used his prescription.

The first man said that once he was able to perform again, he realized that the problems in his marriage went well beyond sex; soon after he began taking Viagra he and his wife separated.

The second, a man in his 70s, said he and his wife realized the emotional connection was already there, so they decided not to use his prescription.

Neither has there been a boomlet of babies as a result of Viagra.

In 2000, Ken Gronbach, a demographer, hailed the certain arrival of a “Viagra Generation,” a demographic of children who would never have been born but for the existence of Viagra .

But population statistics suggest his predictions have not come to pass. Fatherhood rates among older men, always minuscule, have not risen since Viagra came on the market.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, they amounted to 0.3 live births per 1,000 men over age 55 from the mid 1990s through 2005 before dropping to 0.2 births per thousand in 2006, then rising to 0.4 in both 2007 and 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available. That puts birthrates of men over age 55 exactly where they were in the early ’80s.

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