For six years, 30-year-old Eric Zink’s morning routine did not vary. He’d wake at his home near Los Angeles, pour himself a 7.30am shot of vodka, do a line of cocaine, and take a Viagra. Then he’d drive to work.
At the time, Zink had been an alcoholic and drug addict for almost a decade. The cocaine ramped up his libido, but restricted the flow of blood to his penis. So his dealer was supplying Viagra, in addition to his steady stream of cocaine.
‘On my way into work I would pop a pill because I didn’t know if I was going to sleep with the receptionist, or whoever, and I needed to be prepared,’ said Zink, general manager of an RV store. ‘I was a ridiculously well-functioning addict, but destroying my life at the same time.’
Now 44, clean for seven years, Zink realizes he had a lucky escape – and is warning about the dark side of abusing Erectile dysfunction (ED) medication.
‘I would black out all the time, and I never understood why. And then I did a lot of research and realized what combining all those chemicals does to your blood pressure. You don’t cycle through alcohol correctly, and it puts you in a lot of dangerous situations.
‘And then, when it comes to cocaine and other stimulants, it increases what it’s going to do to your heart – the risk of tearing your aortic valve, going into a stroke, going into a seizure or heart attack. You can OD very easily, because your whole system’s whacked.’
Zink is deeply concerned about the growing number of young men taking ED medicines not because they suffer from erectile issues, but because their lifestyle is wreaking havoc on their health.
‘[I don’t know] how safe it is, but I can guarantee its one of the most common drug mixes out there. [It’s] about as common as coke and hookers,’ said one person on a Reddit forum, dedicated to discussing combining ED pills and recreational drugs.
For six years, 30-year-old Eric Zink’s morning routine did not vary. He’d wake at his home near Los Angeles , pour himself a 7:30am shot of vodka, do a line of cocaine, and take a Viagra. Then he’d drive to work. (Erik is pictured at the height of his addiction).
‘People slam grams of soft [cocaine] or tina [crystal meth] on Viagra without any issue regularly, just don’t do poppers,’ said another.
Another ‘advised’: ‘Don’t eat grapefruit with it that’s for sure! Stays in too long, causes palpitations that feel like they could become a heart attack & or make you pass out. However, weirdly enough it works better.’
Lamar Odom, former NBA star and ex-husband of Khloe Kardashian, famously spent three days in a coma in 2015, having had 12 strokes and six heart attacks after taking cocaine and 10 doses of a Viagra-type medication. Dan Bilzerian, a poker player and influencer, in 2017 had two heart attacks in a Las Vegas hospital after taking six times the recommended dose of Viagra, combined with cocaine and alcohol.
Dr Justin Dubin, a urologist and men’s health specialist at Memorial Healthcare System in Florida, has noticed growing numbers of young men using Viagra-type drugs. He said reports of using ED medicines to counter impotence induced by recreational drugs were deeply disturbing.
‘I would advise no one to ever do that,’ he said. ‘I hope people are not doing that.’
Dr Dubin pointed out that drugs including cocaine and methamphetamines are known to run the risk of priapism – an erection that lasts longer than four hours, and requires hospitalization.
‘Those are medical emergencies, and they’re not pleasant to treat,’ he said. ‘You have to inject medicine into your penis, or you have to drain the blood, and that’s because they used cocaine. It’s not due to using ED medication – at least, I’ve never heard of it. To my knowledge, it’s almost impossible to suffer a priapism from ED medicine, unless you’re taking way, way, way too much – like ten times the recommended dosage – or you’re combining it with other substances.’
Max Lugavere, a 42-year-old author and host of a wellness podcast, took Viagra as an experiment in the gym.
It did not, he insists, have the effect for which it is routinely prescribed, but it did spur him on to lift heavier weights.
‘You’re always looking for an edge, especially if fitness is an important part of your lifestyle, and I particularly am interested in those edges that are low risk,’ he said. ‘I’m certainly not advocating people try it, but I was intrigued.
‘The only noticeable effect that I got from it was a really significant pump in the muscles that you’re working out, and some face flushing.’
Lugavere says he personally knows ‘at least a handful of people who are fitness junkies who will regularly take it,’ adding: ‘It’s more common than you would think.’
But he also has a friend who took cocaine and Viagra, and had to go to the ER with priapism.
‘It was really dangerous,’ he said.
Of course, Viagra was never intended to be used by under 40s, looking to counter the effects of cocaine or pump more iron in the gym.
Zink (pictured now) is deeply concerned about the growing number of young men taking ED medicines not because they suffer from erectile issues, but because their lifestyle is wreaking havoc on their health.
Viagra was never intended to be used by under 40s, looking to counter the effects of cocaine or pump more iron in the gym.
Dr Dubin pointed out that drugs including cocaine and methamphetamines are known to run the risk of priapism – an erection that lasts longer than four hours, and requires hospitalization.
Dr Arthur Caplan, who founded the bioethics department at New York University’s school of medicine, was hired by Pfizer in 1998 to assess the potential pitfalls of their revolutionary drug.
Caplan said Pfizer’s executives were seeking a way to get FDA approval for their little blue pills, without enraging conservatives by promoting promiscuity.
‘They needed a medical term in order to get doctors to write the prescription for it,’ said Caplan. ‘So they came up with erectile dysfunction, ED, and the idea it’d be handed out by doctors. It didn’t occur to me that it would extend beyond a prescription, by a doctor, for an age group that was likely to have problems. The idea was that it would always be prescribed responsibly, with an attempt to figure out why this problem was occurring – because erectile dysfunction is a symptom. It’s not a disease.’
So popular was Viagra that it generated over $1 billion in sales annually for Pfizer, reaching a peak of $2.1 billion in 2012.
But rivals emerged, and counterfeits boomed. In 2017 Pfizer’s patent expired, and since then Viagra and its siblings have become accessible online within minutes.
Caplan said the abuse of ED medicines was ‘grossly unethical’, but it was impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
‘Obviously it’s poor medicine, and bad management of health, to use it as an antidote to illegal drugs. That is just not what this sort of drug should be used for.
‘Nowadays you’re getting hold of it so easily, and it’s up to the 25-year-old to make the judgment. And that’s a group that isn’t really known for putting their health first.’
