At the crack of dawn, men both young and old file into the whitewashed building that is the pharmaceutical sciences faculty of Chulalongkorn University. They are on the prowl for knowledge on the nameless pharmaceutical wonder they’d heard in rumor. By noon, a crowd of frantic, impotent men will have gathered in the building’s lobby, fervent to get their – hopes and penises – lifted by Dr. Pornanong Aramwit.
When the Chula clinical pharmacist agreed to breathe life into slouching tigers by formulating an improved herbal sex pill, she didn’t foresee the vast demand her handiwork would attract, or the countless awkward conversations necessary to achieve her aim.
“Excuse me sir, are you married?” she would ask total strangers.
“…Yeah, why?” they would puzzle.
Without blinking, she’d fire off the follow-up:
“Do you have intercourse at least twice a week?”
A local pharmaceutical company that develops medicine from Eastern herbs approached Pornanong back in 2011 for her help to improve an existing herbal aphrodisiac pill, Cappra, as users had complained about its side effects.
Her solution seems deceptively simple, at least to a layperson. To improve the formula, she added one ingredient: safflower.
“You will feel very fresh [and] have a lot of energy,” Pornanong said of her pill, Ya Toda, whose contents smell reminiscent of a traditional Chinese medicine shop. “But if you take Viagra… you’d need to do something. When you [don’t] you will feel very anxious.”
The use of euphemism seems strange for a woman who’s spent the last five years laboring to help men achieve erections.
The Ya Toda pills are priced at approximately THB5,000 per box, or 40 pills. Compare this to Viagra, of which you can only legally purchase eight at said price.
While Pornanong admits that Pfizer’s mega-money blue pills are better than Ya Toda in terms of efficacy, the difference is only marginal – she said 86 percent of subjects saw firm results in the drug’s trial.
Although the myriad types of “herbal viagras” sucked up like sea krill in the baleen of spam filters are dogged by toxicity concerns, Pornanong said Ya Toda is safer. Although findings of side-effects were not yet available, a self-produced study of its predecessor, Cappra, found no serious side-effects. Therefore, she argues, it’s safer than Viagra.
Men on Viagra have died while “doing the activity,” as Pornanong gracefully puts it. Most Viagra deaths aren’t directly caused by the drug, but heart attacks brought on by the feats of exertion it enables, particularly for older users with bad tickers.
Upon popping one of these bad boys, one has to wait (excruciatingly?) for 30 minutes for the magic to happen.
“People cannot wait even half an hour. Some people complain asking why it doesn’t take effect immediately,” she scoffed.
And she has the right to scoff, seeing as it took her team almost three years to formulate Toda. Pornanong vented her frustrations with the difficulty of the study, for which she had to put her dignity at stake to unabashedly elicit sex-life details from security guards, taxi drivers, and construction workers.
Pornanong wasn’t always this comfortable with genitals. It all started in Illinois, where she made hospital rounds as a graduate student and had a life-changing encounter.
“An [African-American] patient had problems with his penis,” she recounted. “And the doctor just pulled the blanket over and” – Pornanong starts flailing her arms at this point – “It was very dark!”
That same day, she had to examine several more crotches before the shock wore off.
It took at least a year just to amass 120 subjects, as not just any tuk-tuk driver or som tam seller on the street was eligible for the study.
“You have to look for a guy who [has erectile dysfunction], and can have [sex] at least twice a week,” Pornanong said. “They have to take the medication twice a week.”
Even when subjects were paid quite hefty sums for their participation, it wasn’t all rainbows and orgasms. What sponsor C.A.P.P. Group Thailand was paying these guinea pigs for were their hours in the hospital for physical exams, loyalty to excite only one woman during the study period, and willpower to complete lengthy questionnaires immediately after sex.
Naturally, not everyone conceded, especially chauffeurs, whose employers feared the study’s grueling physical demands would tire them out.
While Pornanong’s days of meddling in strangers’ personal lives are over (for now), she’s now busy doing interviews and worrying about her safety, as she gets chased on sight at her faculty’s building. It’s not uncommon that people wait up to five hours to interrogate her about the pill.
Her research has also instigated a family reunion of sorts.
“[My uncle] never contacted me for 10 years, but when I was in the newspaper regarding [Ya Toda] he’s like ‘I have a lot of old friends who want to try it… can I get some samples?’” Pornanong said, chuckling with a knowing smile.
Ya Toda sees a booming market in Singapore, Africa, and especially in the Middle East.
“We need to help people,” she said.
And help people she does – Bangkok’s citizen-scientist keeps her spirits erect, fielding endless questions, deflecting men frantic to try her product, and refusing requests to examine their little brothers.
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