Big Pharma is standing in the way of male birth control medication because they say guys just don’t want it.
But in 2008, there’s still no birth control for men. What happened? In a word: money. With the cost of new-drug development hovering in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the pharmaceutical industry decided there wasn’t enough of a market to make male hormonal contraceptives worthwhile. The German drug giant Schering halted its development program in 2006 (after its high-profile acquisition by Bayer), and other drug companies quickly followed suit, abandoning several projects that were — at least by the researchers’ accounts — on the verge of success.
According to Kirsten Thompson, director of the Male Contraception Coalition, if Phase III clinical trials were to begin tomorrow on some of those discarded drugs, men would probably have their pick of contraceptive gels or implants — just like women — within five years. Yet, she says, drug companies still aren’t interested. Though industry representatives refused to speak to the marketability question for this article, one spokeswoman for Organon, Monique Mols, told the industry journal Chemistry World in 2007, “Despite 20 years of research, the development of a [hormonal] method acceptable to a wide population of men is unlikely.”
That’s left some researchers, unsurprisingly, jaded. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” says Dr. David Handelsman, an Australian researcher who has spent two decades studying male contraceptives, including an implant-injection system that delivers testosterone via an implant in the arm, plus a progestin in four yearly injections. “The pharmaceutical industry is completely disconnected from the public and medical perceptions of need.”
Dude. In the past fifteen years, I’m now intimately familiar with marketed treatments and cures for diseases that I’m pretty sure didn’t exist before the pills were invented. If necessary, I know a pharmaceutical cornucopia of options that would give me the ability to hang drywall with my penis after a five-second flipthrough of Playboy. Within five years, a marketable option to give me death ray-eyes will be on the market, and I will be tempted to take that shit, side effects of partial paralysis and spastic colon be damned.
And you’re telling me you can’t market no-baby sex? To men???