Real life Dallas Buyers Club gets reel adaptation
BEIJING: A Chinese film based on a businessman who bought unapproved generic Indian cancer medicines for patients because of the high cost of Western drugs has created a buzz ahead of its release on Thursday.
Dying To Survive was shot partly in Mumbai and got rave reviews at the recent Shanghai Film Festival. It also got a thumbs-up from critics who saw it at a preview.
Xu Zheng, one of China’s A-list actors , portrays a “drug dealer in the feature, which is loosely based on the true story of a Chinese leukaemia patient who smuggled unapproved drugs from India to get affordably-priced medicine for himself and 1,000 others”, China Daily reported.
Leukaemia patient Lu
Yong borrowed the idea from the Oscar-winning film Dallas Buyers Club and smuggled unapproved Indian drugs for himself and others because they were more affordable. Dallas Buyers Club was based on an American AIDS patient who smuggled unapproved drugs for Hiv-positive people in the 1980s.
Lu, a 47-year-old textile businessman, bought a month’s supply of the Indian generic version of Gleevec, developed and manufactured by Swiss drug company Novartis, for around 200 yuan ($32). A bottle of Novartis’ pills cost about 25,000 yuan.
He was detained by police at Yuanjiang in Hunan province and his case of allegedly selling counterfeit drugs is still under investigation, the newspaper reported.
Reports about Lu made national news and were widely discussed on China’s social media, with many saying he was a hero.
The reports also brought into sharp focus how expensive it is to treat cancer in China with medicines from Western countries, whereas generic versions of the same drugs were available in countries such as India at much cheaper prices.