• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, 3 hours ago

A documentary praising a pharma company and its founder?

This rare breed, titled “The Pink Pill,” is now streaming on Paramount + after having won the Audience Award at Doc NYC last fall.

Subtitled “Sex, Drugs & Who Has Control,” the 90-minute film tells the inspiring story of Cindy Eckert, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, and the fight to bring Addyi == aka, the "female Viagra" -- to market. 

Sprout’s Addyi isn’t the only brand involved with the movie.

Behind the scenes, one of the executive producers was Joanna Griffiths, founder of Knix, last covered in these pages when Kristen Belldonned the intimates brand’s leakproof undies. “Being a part of this film is exactly why I founded Knix 13 years ago -- to connect with women from all different walks of life and start conversations that make an impact,” said Griffiths in a statement.

Eckert, meanwhile, founded Sprout after the FDA in 2010 denied approval of Big Pharma firm Boehringer-Ingelheim’s drug flibanserin as a treatment for female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD).

Buying the now-unwanted flibanserin for just $5 million, Eckert renamed it after the “Grey’s Anatomy” character Addison because “she lives life on her own.” Ironically, when the film documents a sometimes rambunctious FDA hearing a few years later in 2015, one Addyi critic says that “certain episodes of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’” are enough for her to overcome low libido. 

Much of the criticism in that hearing stemmed from “Even the Score,” a Sprout-led awareness campaign that played off then-current commercials by Pfizer, which at the time still had exclusive rights to the “little blue pill,” Viagara. “Men who take erectile disfunction medication may find it entirely useless if their partner does not have any sexual desire,” declared a key voiceover.

“It is a thinly veiled, profit-driven marketing campaign filled with bias, misleading, unsubstantiated information,” proclaims one adversary in the FDA hearing.

“Women don’t need treatments. with real side effects, for imaginary diseases invented by marketers,” says another.

In the end, though, the FDA votes to approve Addyi, much to the delight of most of the crowd, including Eckerd – who, as throughout most of the film, sports a trademark pink outfit.

Then comes the real surprise.

After fighting against entrenched sexism to get Addyi approved (one telling fact – the FDA had approved 26 drugs for male sexual dysfunction, but none for females), Eckerd comes up against… Big Pharma.

Two days after the FDA approval, live on air during CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Valeant Pharmaceuticals buys tiny 34-employee Sprout for $1 billion. Valeant then proceeds to raise Addyi pricing to the point where nobody is buying the product…and then fires the Sprout team.

A couple of years later, a group of the ex-Sprouters sue Valeant (soon to be renamed Bausch Health Companies) and get their company back.

All of which would make for a happy ending except (no spoiler here), we’ve been living in scary times for sexual health during the past 10 years, what with the end of Roe v Wade, the erosion of transgender rights, etc., all of which are run down during a rather depressing diversion in the doc.

So I choose to end at the beginning, indeed at the very first line of the film, when Eckerd boasts, “I took on the government for women’s sexual pleasure, and I won.”