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Buying
Power
From
Priest to Pill Prophet: Fred Walters and his Houston
Buyers Club spread the gospel of affordable vitamins
and supplements for helping with the side effects from
HIV drugs
by Ann Walton Sieber
Like so many inspired projects, the Houston Buyers Club
was born out of one lone soul getting really good and
fed up.
It was 1994, and Fred Walters had just attended a seminar
by Nelson Vergel on HIV and nutrition. The founder of
Houston’s Body Positive Wellness Center, Nelson
has become an international HIV expert on the use of
exercise and nutrition to build lean body mass. All
fired up and inspired by Nelson’s lecture, Fred
called up a friend who was also HIV-positive; they went
to a health-food store and picked out several of the
nutritional supplements recommended by Nelson.
“We got nine things and went to the register,”
Fred says. “It was two hundred and twenty dollars!
And I still had three more things to buy! I got really
aggravated.”
This just wasn’t going to work, Fred thought—this
city needed an affordable source for the vitamins, herbs,
and other supplements crucial to those with HIV. So
Fred called together some friends, including Nelson,
Joel Martinez, who is the founder of the Center for
AIDS, and James Alexander, a personal trainer, and they
put together a plan. Established in 1996 as a nonprofit
selling vitamins and supplements out of Fred’s
closet, the Houston Buyers Club’s mission is “to
provide vital nutritional supplements and nutritional
information at no profit to people living with chronic
illness.”
Four years later, the Buyers Club has a mailing list
of 20,000, turns over $270,000 in product sales, and
has an ever-expanding agenda of spreading healthy information
to the HIV community. Part of a grassroots movement
of buyers clubs around the country, Fred now has a staff
of three dedicated part-time people, plus works monster
hours himself. Last year, they wrote and published a
pamphlet on managing the side effects of HIV drugs;
distributed by doctors and AIDS service organizations,
they ran out of their print run of 30,000 pamphlets
in six weeks. They’ve received a grant to print
90,000 more this year, with 30,000 of those to be in
Spanish. They also have plans to produce a quarterly
magazine, The Supplement, which bills itself
as “the first magazine of its kind, integrating
conventional alternative therapies in the treatment
of HIV/AIDS.” Their latest focus is on targeting
women and minorities with HIV.
On average, the Buyers Club only marks up their products
a slim 22 percent over wholesale. Some supplements that
are especially crucial, like glutamine, are only marked
up 5 percent. (The Buyers Club cannot advertise to the
general public—although everyone is most welcome
to shop there—at risk of angering his suppliers
who must consider the health-food stores to which they
distribute.) Fred says that on average, an item he buys
for $10, he’ll sell for $12, while he may find
the same item for sale at Whole Foods for $22. “I
love Whole Foods,” Fred says quickly. “I shop
there, and we’re not trying to be their competition.
They have 20 vitamin Cs, and we have one. But Whole
Foods doesn’t know anything about the side effects
of different AIDS drugs.”
For in addition to price breaks, the other important
function the Buyers Club plays is providing nutritional
information to the HIV community that they won’t
find at the health-food stores—and often not from
their doctors either, as doctors are usually not trained
in nutrition, although many doctors in town refer the
patients to the Buyers Club. In addition, many don’t
feel comfortable discussing the particulars of their
HIV drugs in a place as public as Whole Foods.
“Ask
somebody are you on protease inhibitors?, you
can clear the room in 20 seconds,” Fred says. “Here,
people can talk and not be looking over their shoulder
all the time wondering if people can tell they’re
positive.”
But despite their ever-increasing success and the vital
role they serve, the Buyers Club is still struggling.
After several moves, each time graduating to a bigger
space, the Buyers Club is now located next to the Body
Positive Center, on the 7th floor of the building at
3400 Montrose where Cody’s used to be, just to
the south of Kroger. The space is far from ideal: They
really need a visible and accessible street-level location.
So inadequate are their current quarters, they have
to turn off lights in order to turn on the coffee maker,
or else they’ll blow out a fuse. They are looking
for a new space and need to increase their volume of
sales by another 50 percent in order to make ends meet.
If Fred has a religious fervor about the Buyers Club,
it makes sense; as a young man, he joined the seminary
and to study to become a priest. Although he stayed
for four years, he was always troubled; he found he
could not make peace with the Catholic church’s
rejection of homosexuality, and left in 1990. “OK,
God,” he’d bargained at the time. “You’ve
got three to five years to tell me if you want me to
go back.” Fred looked at me through his owl-ish
glasses, his mild yet intense gaze still carrying a
bit of the seminarian in it. “Three years after
I came out, I turned up positive. So I couldn’t
go back.”
His destiny sealed in his HIV-status (the church will
not accept anyone into the seminary who is HIV-positive,
although they will not turn out seminarians who become
HIV-positive, a position rife with bitter ironies),
Fred had never given up his idealistic yearning to “serve
the poor and poor in spirit.” The Buyers Club seems
to have filled that calling. “I’ve never in
my life loved my work until now.... When I was a kid,
I wanted to serve the poor. I didn’t know what
poor in spirit was until I did this work,” he says.
“When mothers come in who have sons who are sick
and they don’t know what to do for them.... The
need for this information is so overwhelming.”
Everyone Can Buy From the Buyers
Club
Although the Houston Buyers Club’s mission is to
serve the HIV community, everyone is welcome to take
advantage of their just-above-wholesale prices. Indeed,
the Buyers Club could really use the increased business.
“We
need support from the negative community,” says
Fred Walters. “If you’re going to a GNC for
your vitamins, why not come get them at the Buyers Club?”
In addition to information about HIV-related illnesses,
they also serve as a resource for many other chronic
illnesses.
You can either drop in to the Buyers Club, or order
over the phone. They have a complete list of their inventory
on their website, which includes vitamins and minerals,
protein supplements, amino acids, creatine, antioxidants,
digestive enzymes, liver detoxifiers, fatty acids, herbs
(like gingko biloba and St. John’s wort), and hormone
boosters.
Houston
Buyers Club, 3400 Montrose, Suite 610, 713/520-5288,
800/350-2392, website: www.houstonbuyersclub.com,
e-mail: hbc@neosoft.com.
Hours are Monday–Friday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
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