The Dallas Buyers Club

Ron Woodroof was a Dallas electrician and rodeo enthusiast who in nineteen eighty-five was told he had approximately thirty days to live. He had tested positive for HIV. The year was early enough in the epidemic that most American physicians had almost no effective treatment to offer, and the federal drug approval pipeline was not moving at a pace calibrated to the dying.

Woodroof was not, by his own later account, a person inclined toward compassion for gay men, who constituted the most visible face of the AIDS crisis in Dallas and elsewhere. His initial response to his diagnosis was denial, anger, and a desperate search for anything that might work. What he found was that unapproved antiretroviral drugs existed, in Mexico, in Japan, in Europe, being used with some effect in countries where the regulatory environment was different from the United States Food and Drug Administration's. He began smuggling them across borders in his luggage.

By the time he organized a buyers club, distributing unapproved medications to members who paid a monthly fee, he was serving more than five hundred people, most of them gay men whom he had initially wanted nothing to do with and who became, over the years, something close to his community. The Dallas Buyers Club operated in a city and a political culture that, in the mid-nineteen eighties, treated the AIDS epidemic primarily as evidence of moral failure.

Woodroof survived nearly seven years past his thirty-day prognosis. He died in nineteen ninety-two. The buyers club model, and the pressure from buyers clubs across the country, contributed to a reconsideration of Food and Drug Administration compassionate-use policy that changed how the agency approaches experimental treatments.

The policy consequence of his anger outlasted him by decades.