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HIV/AIDS
The Untold Story
http://www.thetalkingdrum.com/aids.html
THEORIES THAT AIDS IS A GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY TO DESTROY
UNDESIRABLE POPULATIONS MAY MAKE POLITICAL SENSE, BUT ARE THEY
SUPPORTED BY FACTS?
AIDS has an uncanny knack for attacking people the dominant
society considers "undesirables": gays, injection drug users (IDUs),
prisoners, and people of color. The commonly cited US statistic
that African Americans have twice the AIDS rate as white
Americans understates the problem because it is based on the
total number of cases since 1981. While white gay men
constituted the large majority of cases in the early days, by
the early 1990s the rate of new cases among Latinos was 2.5
times higher than among whites, and the black/ white ratio was
even starker at 5-1 for men and 15-1 for women. By 1993, AIDS
had become the leading cause of death among African Americans
between the ages of 25 and 44. Internationally, the racial
disparity is even worse: About 80 percent of the world's 9
million AIDS deaths through 1995 have occurred in Africa, where
2 million children have already been orphaned.
AN ALMOST PERFECT FIT
The correlation between AIDS and social and economic oppression
is clear and powerful. What is more, the pattern meshes neatly
with an extensive history of chemical and biological warfare (CBW)
and medical experiments which have targeted people of color,
Third World populations, prisoners, and other unsuspecting
individuals. In the first North American example of CBW, early
European settlers used smallpox infected blankets as a weapon of
genocide against Native Americans. A few centuries later, the US
Army conducted hundreds of tests that released "harmless"
bacteria, viruses, and other agents in populated areas; one was
to determine how a fungal agent thought mainly to affect black
people would spread. Washington also subsidized the pre
marketing tests of birth control pills before a safe dosage was
determined on Puerto Rican and Haitian women who were not warned
of the potentially severe side effects. Since the 1940s, the US
has conducted 154 tests on 9,000 people, soldiers, mental
patients, prisoners many of whom had no idea of the risks
involved. On another level, the drug plague in the ghettos and
barrios whether by intent or not has the effect of chemical
warfare against these communities.
The most apposite example is the four decade long Tuskegee
syphilis study. Starting in 1932, under US Public Health Service
auspices, about 400 black men in rural Alabama were subjects in
an experiment on the effects of untreated syphilis. They were
never told the nature of their condition or that they could
infect their wives and children. Although penicillin, which
became available in the 1940s, was the standard of treatment for
syphilis by 1951, researchers not only withheld treatment but
forbade the men from seeking help elsewhere. This shameful
"experiment" was stopped in 1972, only after a federal health
worker who was involved blew the whistle. Nor is experimentation
on people of color a thing of the past. Beginning in 1989, 1,500
children in West and East Los Angeles and Inglewood were given
an experimental measles vaccine as part of a government
sponsored trial. Most of the subjects were Latino or African
American. The parents of these children were never told that
they were part of an experiment with an unlicensed drug, and
thus had a less than adequate basis for giving their consent.
The Edmonston-Zagreb, or E-Z vaccine was also tested in Senegal
and Guinea-Bissau and Haiti, Guinea, and more than a dozen other
Third World countries. Trials in Los Angeles conducted with the
cooperation of Kaiser Permanente, the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) and John Hopkins University, were stopped two
years later after questions were raised about the vaccine's
relationship to an increased death rate among female infants.
When use of the experimental drug came to light, CDC Director
Dr. David Satcher noted, "A mistake was made. It shocked me. ...
But things sometimes fall through the cracks." Dr. Stephen
Hadler, director of the epidemiology and surveillance division
of the CDC's national immunization program, said that although
researchers have not confirmed a causal association between the
more potent dose of E-Z vaccine and the deaths, "it was enough
to make the World Health Organization say that "high doses of
the vaccine should no longer be considered for use in kids." It
should be emphasized, he told the Los Angeles Times, that the
deaths occurred among children living in poor countries, many of
whom were malnourished and did not have access to adequate
health care. Hadler did not, however, emphasize that those same
conditions are all too common in the US. In light of this
gruesome pattern and pervasive evidence in every corner of
society that the lives of blacks are less valued, there are good
reasons why so many prisoners as well as a significant portion
of the African American community believe that government
scientists deliberately created AIDS as a tool of genocide.
Dangerous To Your Health
There is only one problem with this almost perfect fit: It is
not true. The theories on how HIV the virus that causes AIDS was
purposely spliced together in a lab wilt under scientific
scrutiny. Moreover, these conspiracy theories divert energy from
the work that must be done in the trenches if marginalized
communities are to survive this epidemic: grassroots education,
mobilizations for AIDS prevention, and better care for people
living with HIV. They distract from the urgent need to focus a
spotlight on the life-and-death issue of AIDS prevention and on
the crucial struggle against a racist and profit driven public
health system that is responsible for tens of thousands of
unnecessary deaths. After more than nine years doing AIDS
education in prison, I have found these conspiracy myths to be
the main internal obstacle in terms of prisoners' consciousness
to implementing risk reduction strategies. A recent study at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, confirmed that
African Americans who believe in the conspiracy theories are
significantly less likely to use condoms or to be tested for
HIV. Put bluntly: The false conspiracy theories are themselves a
contributing factor to the terrible toll of unnecessary AIDS
deaths. What's the use, believers ask, of making all the hard
choices to avoid spreading or contracting the disease if the
government is going to find a way to infect people anyway? And
what's the point of all the hassles of safer sex, or all the
inconvenience of not sharing needles if HIV can be spread, as
many conspiracy theorists claim, by casual contact such as
sneezing or handling dishes? The core of the mind-set that
undermines prevention efforts is "denial." People whose
activities have put them at risk of HIV are often petrified and
turn to conspiracy theories as a hip and seemingly militant
rationale for not confronting their own dangerous practices. At
the same time, such theories provide an apparently simple and
satisfying alternative to the complex challenge of dealing with
the myriad of social, behavioral, and medical factors that
propel the epidemic. While convinced that humans did not design
HIV, my main concern here is not to disprove the conspiracy
theories. Neither do I attempt to solve the problem of the
origins of AIDS or even review the many different theories and
approaches to that question. The origin of this disease, as of
many others, is likely to remain unsolved for years to come.
Rather, the article examines the validity of one set of theories
being widely propagated to prisoners and to African American
communities: that HIV was deliberately spliced together in a lab
as a weapon of genocide. What follows is a look at the major
flaws in, and political agenda of, the major conspiracy
theories. Readers uninterested in this detailed critique may
skip to the section beginning with "The Real Genocide," which
discusses the system that made these theories so plausible and
that abets as part of its routine functioning the spread of AIDS
to "undesirable" communities.
SCIENTIFIC UNRAVELING
An early version of the AIDS-as-biowarfare theory was based on
the work of two East German scientists, Jakob and Lilli Segal,
published by the Soviet news agency Tass on March 30, 1987. The
Segals claimed that HIV could not have evolved naturally, being
in fact an artificial splice between visna virus (a retrovirus
that infects the nervous system of sheep) and HTLV-1 (the first
retrovirus known to infect humans). This splice, they asserted,
was created at the notorious CBW lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland,
and then tested on prisoners in the area. Finding the article
politically credible, I sent it to Janet Stavnezer, a friend and
long-time supporter of the civil rights and anti-war movements,
who is a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology
specializing in immunology. Her response was unequivocal: The
Segals' splice theory is scientifically impossible. A few years
later, as perestroika spread, the Soviet Union withdrew these
charges whether out of good science or good diplomacy is
unknown. In any case, by then, even non-scientists had noted
flaws. For example, there was an obvious error of US geography.
The Segals had speculated that the Maryland prisoners, once
released congregated in New York City, which then became the
seedbed of the epidemic. But most Maryland prisoners would have
returned to Baltimore, or Washington, DC neither of which was an
early center of AIDS. Since the Segals, there have been a number
of related theories that HIV was artificially created by
splicing two existing viruses. One, set at Fort Detrick, puts
the date back to 1967; another implicates the World Health
Organization (WHO), starting in 1972. Stavnezer and Mulder
debunk these theories by showing that none of the viruses
posited in the various splice theories has nearly enough genetic
similarity (homology) with HIV to be one of its parents.
Investigative journalist Bob Lederer conducted a separate
inquiry into AIDS conspiracy theories for Covert Action
Information Bulletin in 1987. One of his prime sources, Dr.
David Dubnau, a long- time activist against CBW, was emphatic:
The HIV splice theorists "are simply wrong," he said, and
offered the same explanation as Stavnezer and Mulder. Lederer
had written in the 1987 article that the various non splice
theories of dissemination were plausible. Recently, in light of
current knowledge, he has revised his conclusion and determined
that "None of the AIDS as CBW theories [including the non splice
theories] really holds up." Needing a vehicle for the deliberate
dissemination of the allegedly spliced virus, the conspiracy
theorists also characterize vaccination programs (against
smallpox in Africa, hepatitis-B among gay men in the US, and
polio in various places) as examples of a CBW campaign. While
vaccination programs with inadequate controls for contamination
may have contributed to the spread of the infection, they could
not have been a prime cause: The geography of the vaccination
campaigns does not correspond with the locations of early
centers of AIDS. Meanwhile such unsubstantiated rumors can
dangerously discourage people here and in the Third World from
getting the same protection for their children that have done so
much to stop diseases for more privileged whites.
There is another telling problem with the theories: timing. HIV
almost certainly arose well before scientists had any reason to
consider retroviruses as possible CBW agents to destroy the
human immune system. The first human retrovirus (HTLV-1) was not
discovered until 1977, and could not immediately be linked to
any disease. Through the end of the 1970s the search for human
retroviruses was propelled by speculation that they might cause
cancer, not that they would target the immune system. Since the
epidemiological evidence shows AIDS in several countries in
1978, HIV (a virus with a long incubation period), had to exist
at least a few years before that. And it is probably
considerably older. Retrospective tests on 1,129 blood samples
taken in 1971-72 from US injection drug users found that 14 were
HIV positive. There are also cases of patients who died of AIDS
defining illnesses decades ago: a teenager in St. Louis in 1968,
a sailor in England in 1959, and a Norwegian sailor, his wife
and child in the late 1960s. Preserved tissue and blood samples
from all of these cases later tested positive for HIV
antibodies, although the more difficult direct tests failed to
find the virus itself. Medical case histories going back to the
1930s the earliest period in which accurate records were kept
show isolated cases with all the earmarks of AIDS. Various
analyses of the DNA sequences a technique used for broad
assessment of a specie's age have provided estimates for the age
of HIV that range from 30-900 years. In brief, the lack of
knowledge of any human retroviruses before the late 1970s and
the compelling evidence for the earlier genesis of HIV virtually
eliminate the possibility that scientists deliberately designed
such a germ to destroy the human immune system. More
specifically, and decisively, Stavnezer and Dubnau independently
confirm that all the alleged splices are in fact impossible
because HIV does not have nearly enough genetic similarity to
any of the proposed parent viruses.
SHYSTER SCIENCE
The most common source of the conspiracy theories circulating in
New York State prisons is William Campbell Douglass, M.D.15 His
article "WHO Murdered Africa, "(referring to the World Health
Organization), and his book AIDS: The End of Civilization, are
prime sources for many black community militants and prisoners
who embrace the conspiracy theory out of a sincere desire to
fight genocide. But Douglass, who is white, expresses little
concern for black lives. He instead states his purpose as being
the defense of Western civilization, and describes his politics
as "conservative" which turns out to be quite an understatement
for his ultra right wing political agenda. Douglas taps into the
font of mistrust created by the arrogance and glibness of
establishment science. Quick acceptance of the still unproven
African green monkey theory was especially suspect and led many
people to react against the presumptions of mainstream medicine.
Douglass' alternative, however, is a bizarre cocktail of half
truths, distortions, and lies. He fails to recognize a basic
distinction in epidemiology between the cause of AIDS (a virus)
and a means of transmission (dirty needles) (p. 171). He
evidently thinks that all RNA viruses are retroviruses (p.230)
which is like thinking that all fruits are citrus. And his
pronouncements on the possibility of transmission by insects
display fundamental ignorance of the science involved. There is
also something radically wrong with his statistics; he offers
five different figures for the number of HIV infected people in
the US (pp. 53, 60, 63, 168, 170) without trying to reconcile
the variations. He also" proves" that HIV is a splice of two
other viruses by comparing shapes as depicted in his own crude
sketches (p. 231), when the scientific method for determining
the degree of relatedness of different viruses is to make a
detailed
comparison of the sequence of the base pairs of nucleic acid in
the DNA. Such an analysis disproves the splice theory.
FRAUDULENT "SCIENCE"
Douglass goes beyond mere distortion when he reaches the core of
his conspiracy. His "smoking gun" is an article from the
Bulletin of the World Health Organization. In a blatant
distortion of the 1972 article, Douglass claims that the World
Health Organization called for the engineering of a retrovirus
to cause AIDS. He is unequivocal: WHO is talking about "retro
viruses" and is asking scientists to "attempt to make a hybrid
virus that would be deadly to humans. ...That's AIDS. What the
WHO is saying in plain English is Let's cook up a virus that
selectively destroys the T-cell system of man, an acquired
immune deficiency.' " (Emphasis in original.) He presents an
almost identical description in his book. (p. 80) Aside from the
unlikelihood of conspirators' publishing their evil plans,
Douglass' characterization borders on fraud. The WHO article in
question is not primarily about retroviruses; it is not at all
about engineering new viruses; it never discusses making
hybrids; and it is absolutely not about making a virus to
destroy the human immune system. Anyone who takes the time to
look at the original will find that it details a number of
existing viruses that cause various illnesses in humans and
other mammals. Evidence was emerging by 1972 that some of these
viruses, in addition to their direct damage, impacted the immune
system. The only call the article makes is to study these
secondary effects. He offers only one quote from the original.
Not only does he change the context, he omits the list of
viruses under study. All the listed viruses were related to
already recognized illnesses; most are not retroviruses; none is
a retrovirus that affects humans; and none is a suspect in any
of the proposed scenarios for HIV splicing. Douglass has created
a bogeyman out of thin air.
DEADLY LIES
Douglass' disinformation becomes a deadly threat when he
discredits the very prevention measures needed to save lives:
"It is possible, " he wrote, "that even the government
propaganda concerning intravenous drug use is a red herring. If
the intravenous route is the easiest way to catch AIDS, why does
it take as long as five to seven years for some recipients of
contaminated blood to come down with AIDS?" (p. 171) Here, he
seems to forget the well established incubation period between
infection with HIV and onset of AIDS, although he manages to
remember it later when he refers to a "latency" period of 10
years. (p. 245) And arguing that there isn't a perfect
correlation between the number of acts of intercourse and
infection, he declares "AIDS is not a sexually transmitted
disease. "(p. 243) Then, after sabotaging prevention efforts by
disparaging the well established danger of needle sharing and
unprotected sex, Douglass fuels hysteria with claims that AIDS
can be contracted by casual contact. "The common cold is a
virus," he says in his article. "Have you ever had a cold? How
did you catch it?" By failing to differentiate between airborne
and blood borne viruses, he is conjuring up a scare tactic as
scientific as warning that your hand will be chopped off if you
put it in a goldfish bowl because, after all, a shark is a fish.
He also asserts, citing no evidence, that "the AIDS virus can
live for as long as 10 days on a dry plate," and then asks, "so,
are you worried about your salad in a restaurant that employs
homosexuals?" People are understandably skeptical of government
reassurances on any matter. But we can turn instead to the
experiences of families of people with AIDS and of grassroots
AIDS activists: There are hundreds of thousands of us who have
worked closely with infected people for years without catching
the virus. The unwarranted fears about casual contact deter
sorely needed support for our brothers and sisters living with
HIV infection and divert attention from the most common means of
transmission: unprotected sex and shared drug injection
equipment.
REACTIONARY POLITICS
Despite the apparent irrationality, there is a coherence to
Douglass' distortions and fabrications. They are driven by an
ultra-right-wing political agenda that goes back to the 1960s,
when he was a member of the John Birch Society and ran a phone
line spouting 90 second "patriotic message." In it, Douglass
railed against the civil right movement and denounced the
National Council of Churches and three presidents as part of a
"Communist conspiracy." Among the nuggets he offered callers in
at least 30 US cities was the likelihood "that those three civil
rights workers [presumably Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman] in
Mississippi were kidnaped and murdered by their own kind to drum
up sympathy for their cause." In another message he predicted
that "The Civil Rights Act will turn America into a Fascist
state practically overnight." Two decades later he was blaming
gays for AIDS in The Spotlight, the organ of the
ultra-right-wing Liberty Lobby, for which he wrote regularly and
in which he ran advertisements for "The Douglass Protocol," his
cure all medical clinics. In 1987, he wrote, "some have
suggested that the FDA is waiting for the majority of the
homosexuals to die off before releasing ribavirin," a drug he
was at the time promoting as a miracle cure for AIDS. Douglass,
however, opposed withholding a "suppressed" cure "although I
feel very resentful of the homosexuals because of the holocaust
they have brought on us." Later Douglass began promoting a
strange cure all treatment (pp. 251-52), photoluminescence, in
which small amounts of blood are drawn, irradiated with
ultraviolet light, and reinjected. Treatments at his Clayton,
Georgia, clinic can span several weeks and cost thousands of
dollars. By 1992, when he wrote AIDS: End of Civilization, hes
aw AIDS as part of the "entire mosaic of the current attack
against western civilization" (p. 14); the term "western" being
a thinly veiled code word for "white." He had also shifted blame
from homosexuals to communists, and portrayed AIDS as a
diabolical plot perpetrated by WHO, which "is run by the
Soviets." (p. 118) In these later writings, Douglass weaves an
elaborate and intricate plot describing how the communists much
like an invading virus took over the machinery of the US Army's
CBW labs at Ft. Detrick and the US National Institutes of Health
in order to use them to create and propagate HIV.
Douglass is so mired in anti communism that he fails to revise
this scenario for his 1992 edition after the collapse of the
Soviet Union. He even charges that a Russian, Dr. Sergei
Litivinov, headed WHO's AIDS control program in the late 1980s,
when, in fact, it was led by an American, Jonathan Mann, whose
writings Douglass cites favorably on a number of occasions. In
the guise of a program against AIDS, Douglass proposes a basket
full of policies favored by the ultra right and neo-Nazis:
support and strengthen the powers of local law enforcement (p.
139); make preemptive military strikes against Russia (p. 138);
abolish the UN and WHO (p.120); and stop all illegal Mexican
immigration into the US (p. 253). Then there are his more
specific proposals: mandatory testing for HIV (p. 66);
quarantine of all those with HIV (pp. 165-66); removal of HIV
infected children from school (p. 161); and incarceration,
castration, and execution to stop prostitution. (p. 158) He
argues that if we don't overcome a tradition "where civil rights
are more revered than civil responsibility," hundreds of
millions will die. (p. 165) While such proposals may further the
right's law-and-order agenda, a wealth of public health and
activist experience has shown that such repressive measures are
counterproductive. Discrimination and repression drive those
with HIV and its high risk activities underground, making people
unreachable for prevention, contact notification, and care. And
here is the final appeal in his book: "[I]t appears that
regulation of social behavior, as much as we hate it in an
egalitarian society such as ours, may be necessary for the
survival of civilization." (p. 256)
SIGN OF THE TIMES
As bizarre, self contradictory, and refutable as his
pronouncements are, Douglass is not an isolated crackpot. A
fellow conspiracy theorist with whom he shares much common
ground is Lyndon LaRouche, a notorious neo-fascist with
documented links to US intelligence agencies. LaRouche's
"National Democratic Party Committee" organized the intensely
homophobic campaign in 1986 for California's Proposition 64,
which, had it not been rejected by voters, would have mandated
an AIDS quarantine. In 1989, Douglass and many key LaRouchites
spoke at a conference which focused on various conspiracy
theories for the origin of AIDS. The "scientific" source that
the LaRouchites used for their reactionary campaign is Robert
Strecker, M.D., who also addressed the conference Douglass has
worked closely with Strecker, considers him a mentor, and
dedicates AIDS: The End of Civilization to him. Michael Novick
reported in White Lies/White Power that within the far right, it
is "The LaRouche groups that are particularly dangerous because,
despite their fascist orientation, they have been attempting to
recruit from black groups for some time." The political analysis
of Bo Gritz, head of the "Populist Party" is another source for
AIDS conspiracy theorists. As Novick's book shows, the
"Populists" use anti business rhetoric to try to recruit among
the left, but the organization has deep roots in the ku klux
klan and strong ties to the extreme white supremacist christian
identity. When such forces propagate AIDS conspiracy theories
among African Americans, one result is to divert people from the
grassroots mobilization around prevention and education that
could foster greater cohesion, initiative, and strength within
the black community. At the same time, the right fans the flames
of homophobia which combines with the problem of racism within
the predominately white gay and lesbian movement to undermine a
potentially powerful alliance of the communities most devastated
by government negligence and inaction on AIDS. We live in a
strange and dangerous period when the attractive mantle of
"militant anti-government movement" has been bestowed on
ultra-right-wing, white supremacist groups. The main reason they
can get away with such a farce is that their big brother the
police state did such an effective job in the blood- soaked
repression of opposition groups such as the Black Panthers,
which was rooted in the needs and aspirations of oppressed
people. With people's movements silenced, the right has co-opted
the critique of big government and big business to achieve new
credibility. The seedbed of discontent comes from the erosion of
the previous guarantee of economic security and relative
privileges for a wide range of white people in the middle and
working classes. The right, however, portrays the threat as
coming from the inroads made by women, immigrants and people of
color. Thus their vehemence and militancy spring from the same
legacy of white supremacy and violence that is the basis of the
government they criticize and their program is in essence a call
to return to the pioneer days' ethos that any white male had the
right to lay a violent claim to Native American land, African
American labor, and female subservience. Whatever the right's
motives, the practical consequences are clear: There is a
definite correlation between believing these myths and a failure
to take proven, life saving preventive measures. In the end, the
lies promulgated by the likes of Douglass, Strecker, and
LaRouche kill.
THE REAL GENOCIDE
The New York Times, in an editorial expressing alarm that an
"astonishing" number of African Americans believe in
conspiracies with AIDS as a prime example could only understand
the phenomenon as "paranoia." Educated white folks, to the
degree they are aware of such matters, tend to be "amazed" by
such beliefs. But what is truly amazing is that so many whites
are so out of touch with the systematic attack by the
government-medical-media establishment on the health and lives
of African Americans. The stone wall of calculated ignorance and
denial that blacks face every day is a fine surface on which to
write conspiracies, and may explain why some people become
vested in a plot scenario that seems to crystallize the damage.
But the problem is far more powerful and pervasive than any
narrow conspiracy theory can capture. And although the health
horror this society imposes on African Americans is not a
"mainstream" public issue, black people know what they are
experiencing. They also know that the radical gap between the
life expectancy of African Americans and that of white Americans
was there even before AIDS burst onto the scene. A 1980 Health
and Human Services Department report showed that there were
60,000 "excess deaths" among blacks. This is the number of black
people who would not have died that year if blacks had the same
mortality rate as whites. That figure marks more unnecessary
deaths in one year alone than the total number of US troops
killed during the entire Vietnam War. The black body count is a
direct result of overwhelming black/white differences in living
conditions, public health resources, and medical care. The
infant mortality rate a good indication of basic nutrition and
health care is more than twice as high among black babies as
among whites, while black women die in childbirth at three times
the rate of whites. There are also major differences in
prevention, detection, treatment, and mortality for a host of
other illnesses, such as high blood pressure, pneumonia,
appendicitis and cancer. Comparisons are even starker when class
as well as race is factored, and, of course, the health status
of both Latinos and poor whites is worse than that of more
affluent whites. The situation has worsened since 1980 with the
advent of AIDS and the new wave of tuberculosis. TB, long
considered under control in the US, began a resurgence in 1985.
One big factor was the greater susceptibility of HIV infected
people to TB. But TB is an important example for another reason:
It has always been closely linked to poverty. Crowded tenements,
homeless shelters, jails, inadequate ventilation, and poor
nutrition all facilitate the spread of this serious disease.
Given the distribution of wealth and privilege, it is not
surprising that the rate of TB for black Americans is twice that
for white Americans, African Americans are also assailed by a
range of problems such as high stress, poor nutrition, and
environmental hazards. One significant example of environmental
hazards is the excessive blood levels of lead in children a
condition with proven links to lowered academic performance and
to behavioral disorders. In 1991, 21 percent of black American
children had harmful quantities of lead in their blood, compared
with 8.9 percent of all US children. In addition to disease, the
high rate of black-on-black homicide a secondary but
particularly painful source of needless deaths is in its own way
a corollary of the frustration and misdirected anger bred by
oppression.
STDS AND DRUGS
The evidence is clear that far from being a mysterious new
development, AIDS and other epidemics and health hazards flow
most easily along the contours of social oppression. There are
two particular ways in which the racist structure of US society
fosters the spread of HIV: The public health system fails to
stem the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs); and the
legal system seeks only to punish drug abusers rather than treat
them or ameliorate the underlying social and economic causes. A
major risk factor for HIV transmission is untreated STDs. These
infections can concentrate HIV laden white blood cells in the
genital tract and can also cause genital sores, which are easier
points of entry for HIV. Although STDs can be readily contained
by responsible public health programs, rates began to soar for
blacks in the mid-1980s, with, for example, a doubling of
syphilis for Blacks from 1985 to 1990. At the same time, rates
have remained stable for whites. This grave racial difference
probably results from the lack of adequate STD clinics and the
failings of public health education, along with the more general
breakdown in social cohesion and values that can affect
communities under intense stress. Drugs, along with the violence
and police repression that accompany them, constitute a plague
in their own right for the ghettos and barrios. However, the
public perception that illicit drug use is more prevalent among
non whites is wrong. Household surveys conducted by the National
Institute of Drug Abuse show that African Americans, 12 percent
of the US population, comprise 13 percent of illicit drug users.
Where there is a tremendous difference, though, is in
incarceration. Seventy four percent of the people in prison for
drug possession are African American. There is also a major
racial disparity in terms of drug related infection by HIV.
While partially a result of which drugs are used and how they
are used, there is certainly a big and deadly difference in
access to new (sterile) needles and syringes through either
pharmacies or personal networks. Also, on the street, the police
are much more likely to stop and search Blacks and Latinos. This
practice deters injection drug users of color from carrying
personal sets of works (in states where they are illegal) and
pushes them instead to share needles at shooting galleries.
CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE
The latest example of the public health failing concerning AIDS
is hardly known beyond the immediate circles of AIDS workers.
Studies completed in 1993 showed that the previously recommended
and widely disseminated protocol for cleaning needles with
bleach does not work. Yet there has been no wide scale effort to
sound the urgently needed alarm about this grave danger. The
literature since 1993 has delineated a new, more effective
bleach method that entails using 100 percent undiluted bleach
(as opposed to a 10 percent solution) and holding the bleach or
rinse water in the needle and syringe, while shaking and
tapping, for a full 30 seconds for each step of the nine step
process. However, most IDUs do not even look at new handouts
because they believe they already "know" the bleach method. In
addition, public health authorities have taken no responsibility
for the type of training it takes to get an IDU, anxious to get
high, to properly complete such a complex and time consuming
process. One reason the authorities haven't trumpeted warnings
about the problems with bleach may have more to do with politics
than public health: The assumption that there is an easy method
of bleach sterilization serves as a buffer against pressure to
implement sorely needed needle exchange programs. There is
impressive evidence that these programs, which allow IDUs to
obtain new, sterile needles and syringes, are highly effective
in reducing HIV transmission, while there is no evidence that
they lead to any increase in drug use. Needle exchange programs
could even serve as an outreach and contact point for reducing
drug use if "anti drug" politicians allocated funds for
treatment instead of incarceration. Despite the clear public
health evidence, many politicians have opposed needle exchange
programs out of fear of being labeled "soft on drugs."
Meanwhile, the rate of HIV among IDUs in states where needle are
proscribed is five times higher than in states where they are
legal. Tens of thousands of IDUs their lovers, and their
children have been condemned to die because health agencies
won't advertise their mistakes and because politicians posture
for political advantage by banning the use of federal AIDS funds
for needle exchange programs. Shared needles is just one area of
potential risk reduction. For overall prevention to work, the
most effective and documented method of sharply reducing HIV
transmission in peer education. Homeboys and home girls with
appropriate training in HIV/AIDS information speak the same
language, live in the same situations, and can work with the
people in their communities in the consistent, caring way needed
to change risky behaviors. Meanwhile, prisons provide fertile
ground for peer education. They have some of the highest HIV
rates in the US, and people who might have been constantly on
the move in the street are now stationary and congregated. The
vast majority of prisoners eventually return to their outside
communities where they can spread either AIDS awareness or AIDS.
But prison administrations have generally been hostile to peer
led HIV/AIDS education; only a pitiful handful of such programs
exist, and those are often hamstrung by bureaucratic
restrictions. Allowing misinformation about cleaning needles to
persist, blocking needle exchange programs, failing to treat
STDs, and thwarting prison peer programs are major examples of
the continuing official criminal negligence with regard to AIDS
and in particular, how this plague has been allowed to explode
in the ghettos and barrios.
FIGHT THE POWER
Waiting for the government to act is suicidal. The peer
education model shows that when we take responsibility for
ourselves, our families, and our communities, we can make a big
difference. Through grassroots organizing communities can ally
to demand social use of social resources instead of allowing tax
dollars to go to massive military budgets and corporate welfare
schemes. What we don't need are the fundamentally right wing
conspiracy theories of Dr. Douglass and the like that lead us on
a wild goose chase for the little men in white coats in a secret
lab. The false information they purvey that HIV is spread by
casual contact but not by sex and drugs generates cruelty toward
people with AIDS and fosters support for a police state. In a
bitter twist, these conspiracy theories divert people from
identifying and fighting back against the real genocide. While
US government plots such as the secret radiation and Tuskegee
experiments do in fact exist the damage they've done is small
compared to the high human costs of the everyday functioning of
a two tiered public health system that is rooted in racism,
sexism, and profiteering. Overall, the living conditions of
people of color in the US are a concatenation of epidemics that
cascade through the ghettos and barrios: AIDS-TB-STDs;
unemployment, deteriorating schools, homelessness; drugs,
internal violence, police brutality, wholesale incarcerations;
violence against women, teen pregnancies, declining support
structures for the raising of children; and environmental
hazards. These mutually reinforcing crises flow from decisions
made by government and business on social priorities and the
allocation of economic resources. Government policies that have
such a disparate impact on survival according to race can be
defined as genocide under international law. Whatever term is
used, the cruelty of tens of thousands of preventable deaths is
unconscionable. This reality is the basis for the scream of a
people that "mainstream" society seems unable or unwilling to
hear. These conditions are the real genocide in progress that
must be confronted.
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