Andrew Strempler keeps a poker table folded in the corner of his sparsely decorated office, and a box of chips embossed with the name of his online pharmacy company, RxNorth, handy to play with guests and employees. The one book on his tidy desk is a gambling guide called Texas Hold 'Em.
At age 30, Strempler says his poker playing is just recreational, along with his appetite for fast cars -- two Dodge Vipers, a Jaguar and an immaculately polished yellow Lamborghini, complete with a vanity license plate that reads "RX Boss" -- collected since he transformed his corner pharmacy here into what the Canadian trade association says is the world's first online pharmacy.
That gamble more than paid off. The innovation made Strempler a rich man (a fact he goes to great lengths not to disguise). It created a whole new Canadian industry that has plugged a niche in the US' troubled health care system almost overnight, providing about US$800 million worth of low-cost drugs a year to 2 million uninsured and underinsured Americans, many elderly.
PHOTO: THE NEW YORK TIMES
His brainchild fueled debate about drug costs during the US presidential campaign and is viewed as a tonic for what is wrong in US health care by many consumers and even several governors and members of Congress.
But setting up shop at the intersection of global capitalism, Internet arbitrage and the US' health care problems was controversial. Today Strempler's industry faces strong opposition, stretching from Washington to Ottawa to the multinational drug companies, which are determined to shut it down, warning of the dangers to unsuspecting patients of an Internet drug trade that is not wholly regulated.
Canada's health minister, Ujjal Dosanjh, is expected to propose several stringent new rules in the next few weeks -- measures that Strempler and others claim would strangle the industry -- in a bid to win trade favors from the Bush administration.
Now, if he is to keep his business based in Canada, Strempler is going to have to draw a couple of wild cards, and soon. He recently moved 35 percent of his operation to the UK and he is still globe-trotting, seeking opportunities to open more pharmacy warehouses in the Greek isles and other locales. Such is the heat that he refuses to identify places he is scouting, for fear Washington will intervene to stop him from selling drugs imported from the cheapest global suppliers to Americans -- and eventually, he hopes, to Japanese, Germans and others.
But with all that, Strempler still makes the time to sit back and enjoy what he has wrought.
"I went from milk right to scotch and cognac, and I had to grow up real quick," he said, smoking a Cohiba Esplendido and sipping a snifter of Remy Martin XO before lunch in the ventilated smoking room in his Victorian home in nearby Neepawa.
"I fully believe we are going to be chased around this globe," he added, "and this will not be an easy endeavor."
Just three years ago, Strempler lived in a cramped apartment with his wife, Catherine, over the small pharmacy he had started in this grain and cattle town with a loan from his father, a ninth-grade math teacher. Today he has a 2-year-old son, James, and his home is replete with a stand-up tanning bed, a home gymnasium, a hot tub in the yard, cedar closets, a pool table, a granite bar and a well-stocked, custom-made Spanish cedar humidor.
It has indeed been a fast ride for a smart-thinking young man with smooth features and surprisingly white teeth, who was raised in Winnipeg in a conservative Mennonite home. Burdened with dyslexia, he says, he was never much of a reader and not much of a student.
At 25, fresh out of pharmacy school, he realized he could use the Internet to sell Nicorette gum over the border, where it was more expensive. In three months, his sales climbed to 150 boxes a day, and he gradually expanded into prescription drugs and medical supplies. Last year his sales amounted to US$60 million, and he expects a 10 percent gain in revenues this year.
His business model has been copied by scores of others around Canada and, today, the online industry gives work to more than 4,000 Canadians, mostly in Manitoba, a rural province not known for high-tech innovation.
Strempler has also changed the face of tiny Minnedosa (population: 2,426), a farming and railroad community three hours' drive west of Winnipeg, in the Wheat Belt. He now employs 175 people, and he has financed the extension of the municipal golf course to 18 holes from nine to accommodate his own golf tournament, set up college scholarships for the local high school and rejuvenated a summer rock festival to promote tourism.
"I would rather be known as a business revolutionary than the man who got rich," he insists. "It amazes me that no one did this first in Toronto, where so many more Americans come complaining about their drug prices back home. I don't know why any of those pharmacies taking care of busloads of Americans crossing the border didn't think of it."
The answer may come, at least in part, from the fact that importing prescription drugs is illegal in the US, although no one has been arrested since Strempler plunged into the gray market with sales to individual, usually elderly, clients.
"We have filled one and a half million prescriptions and we haven't had a lawsuit yet," he said.
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