Dallas Buyers Club Plot Wiki

Woodroof begins selling the drugs on the street and at gay nightclubs. He comes back into contact with Rayon, with whom he reluctantly sets up business since she can bring many more clients. The pair establish the \"Dallas Buyers Club\", charging $400 per month for membership, and it becomes extremely popular. He gradually begins to respect Rayon and think of her as a friend. When Woodroof has a heart attack caused by a recently acquired dose of interferon, Dr. Sevard learns of the club and the alternative medication. He is angry that it is interrupting his trial, while Richard Barkley of the FDA confiscates the interferon and threatens to have Woodroof arrested. Dr. Saks agrees that there are benefits to AIDS medicine buyers clubs (of which there are several around the country) but feels powerless to change anything. The processes that the FDA uses to research, test and approve drugs is seen as flawed and a part of the problem for AIDS patients. Dr. Saks and Woodroof strike up a friendship.

The FDA gets a warrant to raid the buyers club but can do nothing but fine Woodroof. The FDA changes its regulations in 1987, making any unapproved drug illegal. With the club strapped for cash, Rayon begs her father for money and tells Woodroof that she has sold her life insurance policy to raise money. Woodroof travels to Mexico and gets more peptide T. Upon his return, Ron finds that Rayon has died in the hospital. Upset by Rayon's death, Saks is asked to resign when the hospital discovers she had been sending patients to the buyers club, but refuses, insisting that she will have to be fired instead.

The characters of Rayon and Dr. Eve Saks were fictional; the writers had interviewed transgender AIDS patients, activists, and doctors for the film and combined these stories to create the two composite supporting roles.[97] However, Woodroof did lose all his friends after they found out he was HIV-positive. In his interviews with Borten, Woodroof implied that this, along with interactions with gay people living with AIDS through the buyers club, led to a rethinking of his apparent anti-gay sentiments and changed his views on gay people. Other people who knew him said that he did not harbor anti-gay sentiments and was himself bisexual.[98][99] Also, while a rodeo enthusiast, he never rode any bulls himself.[100] Although the film shows Woodroof diagnosed in 1985, he told Borten that a doctor had informed him he might have had the disease well before that; Woodroof believed that he may have been infected in 1981, something that was briefly alluded to in a flashback in the film.[19]

The treatments that Woodroof did promote were less-effective at best, or at worst, dangerous. According to Staley, Woodroof became a proponent of Peptide T, a treatment which \"never panned out. It's a useless therapy, and it never got approved, and nobody uses it today, but the film implies that it helped him.\"[105] DDC, also promoted by Woodroof, did prove to be an effective antiviral treatment, but it also proved to have worse side effects than AZT, with the potential to cause irreversible nerve damage in some cases. As a result, it was only used by doctors for a relatively short time.[105] A third treatment promoted by Woodroof, called Compound Q (Trichosanthin), was specifically linked to two deaths during trials, and therefore, was not used by doctors thereafter. Most \"buyers clubs\" stopped providing it as well, but Woodroof continued to dispense it, part of the reason for Woodroof's conflict with the FDA.[105] 781b155fdc