The Town Viagra Built Tries to Move On

摘要

In December, the Puerto Rican government may default on its bond payments after years of overborrowing-it owes $70 billion-and lack of growth. The origins of the crisis lie partly in a tax break that enriched and then devastated the Puerto Rican economy. "We're responsible for a lot of good moments," Mayor Wanda Soler Rosario says in her office in Barceloneta's city hall. After Pfizer won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for Viagra in 1998, it chose a plant in the city to produce the drug that helped millions of men overcome impotence. The pineapple-and-sugar-cane town was transformed into one of the biggest concentrations of pharmaceutical manufacturing in the U.S.