Danielle Young
EEE-2083
Dallas Buyers Club
October 26 2022
I did not know what to expect when watching this movie and I was pleasantly surprised because it was really entertaining, I knew some of the actors and it showed a different side of the entrepreneur world that I have not seen. The main character's name is Ron Woodruff, he was a bull rider, electrician then later in the movie he becomes an entrepreneur on his own terms. One day while he was at work he electrocuted himself trying to free one of his workers that got stuck under the heavy machinery. After he got sent to the hospital he was told bad news, he got told he had HIV or AIDS. He was shocked with that news and racked his brain as to how he could have gotten it. He also started doing his own research on his disease. Shortly after realizing all the side effects that AZT caused he decided to start treating it himself with vitamins and flying all over the world trying to find solutions. Which then led to him making his own business of selling drugs to the people that need it to survive. Which were not FDA approved. As his business grew and expanded he kept running into legal trouble. Such as the FDA not approving one specific drug that is called peptide T. Which was claimed as nontoxic by the FDA but then proceeds to tell Ron that he can not use it because it is not FDA approved. In this movie they portrayed that the regulation they put down on new meds for AIDS is shown as bringing bad and just not caring.
I thought this was interesting because you never think of a business illegally bringing drugs into the US and illegally selling them to the public. And we have only heard and watched businesses go about this the legal way. This was a nice change of pace. It was also interesting seeing how the FDA started bullying Ron because of what he was doing. He did not let that affect him, he kept going about his business and helping people that had the same disease as him. It surprised me that he did not believe the doctors and then found his own way to help him survive this disease and that he lived 7 years longer than he was originally told, he was originally told that he would live 30 days. That is kind of a big difference.
Ron affected society in numerous ways, such as providing a drug that will help people with AIDS. He found numerous ways to go about selling these drugs to the public, which was illegal. But he was doing this so these people did not suffer and die in a month. He did it so they could live a few more years and live the life they wanted. He even went to court with the FDA because he was using a drug that they claimed was non toxic, but now we're saying it is illegal and wrong. I think this movie did a good job portraying the darker side to entrepreneurship and the darker side of the government wanting to control what is available to the public. They never wanted to cure AIDS, they wanted people to keep coming back to get the medicine.