Læknaneminn - 01.04.1997, Síða 112

Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick
Fig. 4 The label on a bottle of AZT from
the Sigma Co.
100 mg A-2169 Lot 92H780U
r tri
toxic loiic b» inluli' 3'-AZIDO-3'-DEOXYTHYMIDINE Jgjg
mllowtd. Iir- (AZT; Azidothymidine) i30Si6-87.ii
wtll, sttk mtdi- cal Idiict (sho* Ihe libtl whtn possibli). Wnr suitiblt pratec- ttvi clothinf. Desiccate C,oHnN,0. FW 267.2 Purity >99% (HPLC) StOre at leSS than 0*C For Uboratory ust om». Not lor drag. housthold or othirusis. 'S'SICMACHEMICALCO.PO Oo.usoi Sr Kwsnoainusi lum-srso =
The advisory on the label reads: “TOXIC.
Toxic by inhalation, in contact with skin and
if swallowed. Target organ(s): Blood bone
marrow. If you feel unwell, seek medicai
advice (show the label where possible). Wear
suitable protective clothing.
The key to the drug hypothesis is that with drugs, the
dose makes thepoison 2n. Only long-term consumption
accumulates sufficient dosage to cause AIDS-defining
diseases. Occasional or short-term recreational drug
use causes first the desired euphoria which is followed
either by reversible diseases or by no diseases at all.
That is why it takes 20 years of smoking to acquire the
tabacco dose for lung cancer or emphysema, 20 years of
drinking to acquire the alcohol dose for liver cirrhosis,
and 10 years of drug use to acquire the toxic dose lead-
ing to AIDS. In other words, drugs used at recreation-
al doses are siow pathogens.
In contrast to drugs, infectious agents are self-repli-
cating, and hence (if at all) fast pathogens. By multi-
plying exponentially in the body pathogenic infectious
agents generate sufficient doses of toxic substances to
cause diseases within days or weeks 50'212. Thus,
microbes are either fast pathogens or no pathogens at
all.
Hardly anybody remembers that from 1981 to 1984,
before the HIV hypothesis became national dogma,
recreational drugs such as nitrite and ethylchloride
inhalants, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, phenylcycli-
dine, and LSD, were proposed by epidemiologists and
toxicologists as the causes of AIDS. The reason for the
early suspicion of drugs was simple. Nearly all AIDS
patients were either male homosexuals who had used
these drugs as aphrodisiacs and psychoactive agents, or
were heterosexual intravenous drug users n1,13°’132,13S'1'14,
2i3-2i8. Before April 1984 many independent investiga-
tors and even scientists from the CDC in Atlanta con-
sidered AIDS a collection of drug diseases.
For example, between 1981 and 1982 the former
CDC head James Curran stated, “At this point our best
clue to the cause of the disease was ‘poppers’” 219.
Curran’s clue was gleaned from anecdotal evidence
including the first two Kaposi’s sarcoma patients seen
by Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien, professor of dermatology
at New York University. Both of these patients were
male homosexuals who “had a multiplicity of sexual
partners over an extended period of time as well as
using a variety of recreational drugs — cocaine, mari-
juana, LSD, THC, MDA, and amyl nitrite.”
Friedman-Kien regularly called CDC officials to report
his experience with AIDS: “...as patients started com-
ing in, it turned out that all of them, 100 percent, had
been using amyl nitrite” 2I9. The CDC’s AIDS
researcher Harold Jaffe, now director of the HIV/AIDS
division, also reported, through information gathered
anecdotally, that over 90% of the surviving AIDS
patients he talked to admitted regular nitrite use nl'215.
Evidence continued to mount strongly supporting a
correlation between nitrite use and AIDS. This includ-
ed two Lancet articles, one by NIH researchers James
Goedert, William Blattner et al. 132, another by an
English team 108, the data collected by Harry Haverkos
of the CDC’s Kaposi’s sarcoma opportunistic infection
(KSOI) task force, and an abundance of prior studies
on the immunotoxic effects of nitrates and nitrites '30.
Drugs seemed to be the most plausible explanation
for the restriction of AIDS to risk groups, because drug
consumption was the only dangerous common denom-
inator of male and female intravenous drug users and
male homosexuals. This original drug-AIDS hypothe-
sis was euphemistically called the “lifestyle hypothesis”
220
The drug-AIDS hypothesis was just as plausible then
as it is now. Drug toxicity provides chemically plausi-
ble causes of disease. Based on their intrinsic chemical
properties drugs used by AIDS patients are either indi-
rectly toxic, cytotoxic, mutagenic (genotoxic), carcino-
genic, or a combination of these. And, since its appear-
ance in 1981 AIDS coincides exactly, both chronolog-
ically and epidemiologically, with the American and
European drug use epidemics (see 3. and 4.).
However, since the enthusiastic acceptance of the
LÆKNANEMINN
110 L tbl. 1997, 50. árg.