People do silly things. Little Wally (pictured on left) is proof of that. To honor this silly behavior, Aphrodisiology.com has created a new award, The Little Wally. Aphrodisiology starts out by bestowing this prestigious award to George May, who demonstrated a fine example of aphrodisiac-related behavior that makes us all scratch our our head and ask 'what the hell was he thinking'?

Viagra in Oysters

The first Little Wally award goes to George May, a 59 year old executive and sea food entrepreneur from Brisbane, Australia. Mr. May came up with the brilliant idea of feeding Viagra to oysters in a quest to develop the perfect aphrodisiac.

The most likely consequence of this is that the oysters metabolize and excrete the Viagra, which is pretty much a waste of good drugs. Although PETA might look kindly on this attempt to improve the way we treat captive animals, most others recognize that this is just silly.

According to May, when viagra is added to the water that the oysters grow in, there is a "trace amount" of the drug that remains in the flesh. It isn't clear if this small amount is enough to have a pharmacological effect on men who might eat these oysters. Modern equipment for chemical analysis can detect many chemicals way down to the parts per million or parts per billion - too small to wake up Wally.

It's really a catch-22 situation: If there is enough Viagra remaining to make your dog growl, then Mr. May would be in a position of selling prescription medicines to people with out a prescription, which is rather illegal. If there isn't enough to have an effect, then it would be clever marketing that borders on fraud, depending on what your definition of the word "is" is.

And the Pfizer company (which owns the rights to Viagra) doesn't like the idea of any one marketing a product using the name of their product, which guarantees a big lawsuit (which Mr. May would very likely lose).

The governments and corporations seem to be in perfect alignment. People can have their oysters. People can have their Viagra. But they can't have Viagra in their oysters.

Back to the drawing board, Mr. May. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. You can drop by any time to pick up the little dog statue.

Links

• Oyster Page at Aphrodisiology.com
• Daily Telegraph Story - (Australian Newspaper)

If you'd like to nominate someone for a Little Wally Award, drop an email to Wally at aphrodisiology.com. The first award came as a suggestion from T.R. in Vancouver, B.C. Canada.