Listening to the caller on the other end of the line, Alan Cahn looks distinctly surprised. “Houston! How did you get my name? Uh-huh. Really? Houston?”
AZT he’s selling right now for $1.30 a capsule. The average is around $1.60. Since patients must take about 400 capsules a month, Cahn is underselling his competition by $120 a month. The savings are substantial.
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Since this caller is from out of town, Cahn gives him the 800 number of Project Informed, in California, for information about AIDS. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” he tells the guy. “These people will settle you down a bit.” Had the caller been from Chicago, Cahn would also have given him the phone number of the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic, which specializes in treating patients who have tested positive for HIV.
At one time Cahn owned six pharmacies, most of them on Broadway in New Town. Since the area has a high population of gays, he began getting many requests to fill prescriptions for AIDS patients.
Cahn says he’s one of the few pharmacists he knows who fills prescriptions “on assignment,” which means the patient doesn’t pay; instead, Cahn gets reimbursed–he hopes–by the insurance companies. He yanks open a file drawer. “See this? This is incredible. There’s over $100,000 in orders here that I’ve filled, and that people throughout the United States owe me for.”
Without missing a beat, he’s back into our conversation. “I saw this one customer, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a year and a half ago. He came in, and I called his doctor and said, ‘We got to do something for this guy!’ He looked terrible, like he hadn’t eaten in days. I grabbed a couple cans of food and began feeding this guy. The next day he went into the hospital.
