HIV/AIDS
The Untold Story
THEORIES
THAT AIDS IS A GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY TO DESTROY UNDESIRABLE POPULATIONS
MAY MAKE POLITICAL SENSE, BUT ARE THEY SUPPORTED BY FACTS?
Table Of Contents
Dangerous To Your Health Scientific
Unraveling Shyster Science Fraudulent
Science Deadly Lies
Reactionary Politics
Sign Of The Times The
Real Genocide Sexually Transmitted
Diseases And Drugs Criminal
Negligence Fight The Power
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.