“I saw the Dallas Buyers Club yesterday. It is a movie about an AIDS patient Ron Woodroof, who smuggled unapproved pharmaceutical drugs into Texas when he found them effective at improving his symptoms. He started distributing them to fellow AIDS sufferers by establishing the eponymous “Dallas Buyers Club” whilst facing opposition from the FDA. Ron Woodroof goes to extreme lengths to access anti-HIV drugs even bribing a hospital worker to access AZT. It is a very touching movie and captures the esprit de corps of the AIDS activists at the time.”
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| Charles Fox |
With a Little Help from My Friends:
…… My main preoccupation, as I embarked upon the quest for interferon, was the morality involved. I had never been very good at this, maintaining, as I had, an outsider’s position, bordering therefore on antisocial. I attributed this attitude to two things: being a writer and therefore an observer, and being English and therefore a foreigner……
….. Getting interferon was going to involve duplicity, subterfuge and possibly some technically criminal behavior. After considerable thought, I gave myself permission to do whatever it took, provided that I was not depriving any other individual of what I sought for myself. Do anything you like, just don’t scare the horse…..
….. Just going off to some storefront neurologist to get interferon would be like going to the Coast Guard to ask for the use of an atomic sub. In order to handle an experimental drug, an accredited researcher must first obtain an Investigational New Drug number (IND) from the Food and Drug Administration, a whole medicine show unto itself. Accredited researchers tended to be obsessive by nature. They were the Nobel Prize winners who had syndromes and diseases named after them. I imagined they rarely find time to talk to each other, let alone to patients in wheelchairs. But, I reasoned, with someone from the media, especially the responsible media, it would be a different story. Publicity could mean money, and money for research was drying up, with more and more researchers competing for less and less cash. I figured if I wished to speak to researchers riding the crest of the wave and I didn’t have the money to pay them myself, I could go as the man from the media. I went to my New York agent and asked her to get me an assignment from a good magazine. This way I could find out for myself what the real story was and whether interferon was really worth chasing. If it was, then the first choice would most probably be to get into Jacobs’s study in Buffalo, or one trying to duplicate his findings. My agent got me an assignment from Harper’s Magazine. Its editor, Michael Kinsley, called from New York. He was excited about the idea. He said at once they would call it ‘Waiting for Interferon’. I had no intention of writing the piece. I didn’t need the money and could see Kinsley and Harper’s would be exhaustively demanding. I just wanted to get the information……
P.S. “I have contacted Charles Fox’s daughter and have asked her permission to publish the full chapter 24 on-line and to help get his book published online.”
Maybe someone should reopen a New York and Dallas Buyers Club to import Lemtrada and Cladribine into the USA from Canada and Mexico for people with MS who want an induction therapy?
Now there's a thought!
Another lovely post; I would be very interested in reading his book.
Great movie! Let's celebrate people like Ron Woodroof (and Charles Fox); what would society be like without them?
You wouldn't need a Dallas Buyer's Club for induction therapy because you wouldn't need to take it every day. You could just take a week off work and go to Mexico. For me, what's missing is good guidance on whether I'm a good candidate for the drug, who in the US could monitor me after treatment (if I am a candidate), and how to find legitimate medical professionals and facilities in another country.