How the Oscar-Winning Libertarian Favorite 'Dallas Buyers Club' Exposes the FDA

A winner of three Academy Awards, the AIDS drama Dallas Buyers Club is being hailed as a landmark film for its sympathetic portrayal of gays and transsexuals. But what really makes the film a landmark is how it makes the Food and Drug Administration its villain. The film portrays the FDA as at best slow off the mark to make potentially life-saving drugs available to dying people and at worst as a corrupt organization that is essentially a puppet of the pharmaceutical industry it means to regulate.

The film is becoming the libertarian favorite of the year for showing Ron Woodroof, an AIDS-stricken Texan electrician in the 1980s (played by Matthew McConaughey in his Oscar-winning performance) as a freedom fighter battling a tyrannical FDA. In Mexico, he meets an American doctor who tells him that the FDA-studied drug, AZT, which was being tested to combat AIDS in the United States at the time and was subsequently approved for that use, is counterproductive when used by itself because it destroys good cells along with bad ones. Woodroof can’t legally get AZT in the United States anyway, so he tries other drugs in Mexico along with vitamins and supplements and finds the cocktail improving his health and extending by several years his life, which at the outset of the film was said to be in its final four weeks.

The film’s title is itself a reference to evading FDA strictures: The men pay $400 a month to belong to Woodroof’s club, not directly for drugs, which keeps the business legal. All the risk is borne by the individuals agreeing to treatment: “You croak, you croak. It’s not our problem,” Woodroof explains.
How the Oscar-Winning Libertarian Favorite 'Dallas Buyers Club' Exposes the FDA 670px-matthew_mcconaughey_2011_aa1

How the Oscar-Winning Libertarian Favorite 'Dallas Buyers Club' Exposes the FDA 670px-matthew_mcconaughey_2011_aa1

More: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2014/03/05/how-the-oscar-winning-libertarian-favorite-dallas-buyers-club-exposes-the-fda/

How the Oscar-Winning Libertarian Favorite 'Dallas Buyers Club' Exposes the FDA

How the Oscar-Winning Libertarian Favorite 'Dallas Buyers Club' Exposes the FDA

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