Inventor halves Viagra costs, doubles pleasure 1:05pm ET (Reuters)
By Bill Berkrot
NEW YORK, Sept 12 (Reuters) - A thrifty 70-year-old Viagra user has found that frugality can be the mother of invention.
Armed with personal knowledge that sexual prowess in pill form can be costly, inventor Carmen Reitano has come up with an efficient way to stretch Viagra dollars.
Giving new meaning to the phrase "double your pleasure," Reitano is selling a device he designed specifically to break the famous blue anti-impotence pill into two equal doses.
A visitor to the Web site (http://www.v2pillsplitter.com) is greeted by the scrolling message: The Revolutionary V2 Viagra pill splitter instantly lowers your costs 50 percent.
Since Pfizer Inc charges about $10 per tablet for all dosages, there is incentive to seek a higher dosage from physicians and try to split the drug that longtime user Reitano calls "a Godsend."
Reitano says it has been his experience that "doctors and HMOs are generally fully supportive of the pill splitting."
While the practice could cut into profits should it become widespread, Pfizer, which earned $1.5 billion in worldwide Viagra sales last year, was not exactly quaking over the entrepreneurial attempt to exploit the one-price-fits-all system.
"I don't think it would affect the profit structure," Pfizer spokesman Geoff Cook said of Reitano's invention.
Still, a Viagra user who splits a four-pill monthly prescription would double his supply and save $240 a year. A more frequent user would save a significant amount of money for someone on a fixed income or tight budget.
NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT
Reitano found he was not alone in trying to stretch the four pills a month allowed by his insurance company.
The idea for a Viagra-specific pill splitter was sparked by chatter among guys in the locker room of Reitano's gym in Newburyport, Massachusetts, about the cost of the erectile dysfunction treatment and how tough it was to divide the pill using conventional, or even fairly inventive means.
Because of its odd shape -- with a curved top and bottom -- extremely hard outer coating and unbound interior, Viagra pills are notoriously difficult to cut with any accuracy.
"It either flies away, breaks unevenly, or it just disintegrates," Reitano said.
Acquaintances and customers have shared personal Viagra-cutting horror stories with the inventor who expects a U.S. patent for his device "possibly within a month."
"The funniest stories are that it ricochets because you have to hit it so damn hard to cut it and then you've got to find out where it went behind the refrigerator," Reitano said.
He heard from one enterprising fellow who dissolved his Viagra pills in water and tried to divide them by freezing the water into ice cubes for later use.
"It seemed to me the only way to really develop an efficient way to cut it was to customize a device to lock in place and guillotine the pill," explained Reitano.
His little hand held guillotine comes in two sizes -- one for 100 milligram Viagra and one for the 50 mg pills.
The Viagra splitter has been on the market via the Internet for about two months, but was officially announced through press release only early this month. So far, demand for the device, which sells for about $30, has been brisk, if not overwhelming.
"I would like to say thousands but we've gotten several hundred orders so far," Reitano said. "The majority of orders are from the United States, but we have gotten multiple orders from Australia, Japan, China."
That level of interest without major advertising, "tells me there's a pent up demand out there," Reitano said.
Since Viagra hit the market in April of 1998, 100 million prescriptions for the drug have been written, Pfizer said.
Due to the sensitive nature of the disorder, doctors say more than 80 percent of an estimated 40 million men who suffer some degree of erectile dysfunction have yet to seek treatment. That makes for an enormous untapped market.
Says the optimistic septuagenarian inventor: "I would suspect that the economics and the size of the user base makes this potentially big business."
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