A slide from ‘Day Of The Hivid’, 1992
At the time I wrote the memoir essays that accompany Dextran Man, Part 1 and Part 2, there wasn’t much interest about buyers clubs for HIV/AIDS drugs. The movie Dallas Buyers Club hadn’t been released yet, and coupled with the general forgetting of the AIDS epidemic over the preceding 15 or so years, buyers clubs weren’t really known outside the community that had used them.
But now, due to the recent uptick in willingness to remember (amongst us who lived through it) and inquisitiveness (amongst historians and documentary makers who didn’t), people are curious about this phenomenon of patient self-empowerment.
I do get asked from time to time for details of how the Sydney buyers club was run. And the mainstream media get disappointed by the answers. They have this notion that it was romantically cloak-and-dagger. Playboy magazine interviewed me in 2013, a few months before the release of Dallas Buyers Club. Then the writer said the publication didn’t want to run the interview because it wasn’t what they’d thought. I hadn’t made mules swallow condoms filled with drugs. I’d just booked FedEx.
So, I thought about how to give out the details, and I’ve concluded that the best way is to publish a document from that time.
This address, Day of the Hivid, was delivered at the 5th National Conference on HIV, held in Darling Harbour, Sydney in November 1992.
But it began as a talk I gave to staff at Roche Products, the Australian subsidiary of the multinational pharmaceutical giant Hoffman La Roche, which owned the drug ddC.
The talk came out of my relationship with a product manager there named Michael. At the start, the relationship was a little adversarial, but it ultimately led to a cooperation for which I was grateful, because it rescued my buyers club clients at a bad time. I‘ll come to that. Read More
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