In the 2013 film "Dallas Buyers Club", an aspect of entrepreneurship that I found interesting is regulation. In the film, Ron Woodroof (played by Matthew McConaughey) is an HIV patient who develops AIDS after his horrible drug abuse when he finds out about his condition. Doctors tell him that he only has 30 days to live. He asks the doctors for unapproved medication to help treat it, but they say they can't give it to him because the FDA hasn't approved it yet (they approve it soon after, but the drug has a lot of issues). He resorts to buying the drug underhand from one of the custodians that works at the hospital. It ends up being too toxic for him to handle, and the hospital finds out about it so he's unable to keep doing it, but the custodian tells him he could find it from a doctor in Mexico. Ron ends up illegally smuggling a bunch of other vitamins and drugs to the US to sell to people suffering from HIV that don't have time to wait for FDA approval. All of the unapproved drugs clearly work better for the patients compared to the old drug, but he keeps facing pressure from the FDA and law enforcement. This reason that this is entrepreneurial is because Ron went about moving around the regulations to help people in need and make the world of HIV patients a much less scary one.
The reason that this is so interesting is because the regulations put in place didn't do a lot of good for the people in this film. Many people suffer from life threatening diseases and would much rather take their chances with an "unknown" drug than wait for regulators to do a bunch of testing because they simply put cannot wait. Since we see the movie from essentially Ron's perspective, we can clearly see that what he does only helps people and he should be seen as a sort of hero. In real life, when things like this happen a lot of the time the news and regulators spread this idea that is it bad and the people that do it should be shamed upon, which is very eye opening.
This aspect of entrepreneurship affects society in both good and bad ways. Regulations are important as they sort of guide society and are the structures that everyone has to follow. In the perspective of drug regulations, it is a good thing that drugs need to be approved before being able to just be prescribed to anyone, however this is not so good when there are people that don't have the time to wait for drugs to be approved. This is sort of an unseen effect, as discussed in class and the book, as many people die because they were unable to get treatment. These regulations can be seen as both effective and ineffective. Society can persuade changes to regulations, such as what happened with Ron in the film and how at the end he did get court approval to use a certain drug, but unfortunately only for his personal use. Later on it ended up getting approved for everyone. Society can also help support people like Ron and getting regulations changed, such as all of the HIV patients that came and helped out Ron with his buyers club. The interaction between regulations and the people that they affect is an ugly one, as there is a constant tug of war game being played to keep on ratifying regulations to improve them. As shown in the film, a lot of the time drug manufacturers will pay the FDA to approve their drug when there might be a bucket full of better and safer options for people. The way that the system works as of now is distorted, just like as discussed in the econtalk podcast. Ratifying regulations should be a much easier process than it is now, as a lot of the time there are a lot of ineffective ones, even if they do help as well.
