Læknaneminn - 01.04.1997, Page 124

Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick
Although the majority of American AIDS patients -
male homosexuals, and probably all Kaposi’s sarcoma
patients - have been using cytotoxic and carcinogenic
nitrite inhalants and many other toxic recreational
drugs, non-injected drugs are not reported as an AIDS
risk category by the CDC’s HIV/AIDS Surveillance
Reports. But no HIV infection ”category” is too small
to be left out of the Surveillance Reports, as for example
the less than 10 annual male AIDS cases that reported-
ly result from ”sex with a person with hemophilia” 32‘.
The San Francisco Chronicle just demonstrated the
consequences of the orthodox blindness to the drug-
AIDS connection Under the title “HIV hits former
USSR - a small city’s story,” ™. The journal is shocked
that “half of the town’s drug-injecting subculture is
believed to be infected [by HIV]” and that “AIDS will
be more common here than America”. But neither the
journal nor the journalist even gave a thought to the
possibility that “to shoot raw opium” may be the cause
of the predicted AIDS epidemic.
7.2. Misrepresentation offacts, example 1. The CDC
provides the first example of misrepresenting facts to
dissociate drugs from AIDS. After the publication in
April 1983 of two different AIDS viruses in Science,
one by Gallo (HTLV-I) 328 the other by Montagnier
329 (now termed HIV), the CDC was ready to abandon
the drug hypothesis. But in view of the overwhelming
correlations between drugs (particularly nitrites) and
AIDS, functional evidence was necessary to discard the
drug hypothesis in favor of viral AIDS.
To accomplish this transition the CDC commis-
sioned a study of the immune effects of nitrite
inhalants on mice and published the results in an
anonymous one-page-paper in the CDC’s house jour-
nal, the Morbidity Mortality Weekly Reports 33°. The
study concluded that, “None of the animals exposed to
IBN (isobutyl nitrite) showed any evidence of
immunotoxic reactions. Methemaglobinemia [oxida-
tion of hemoglobin] was noted in animals exposed to
300 ppm (parts per million) of IBN, and some evi-
dence of thymic atrophy, possibly stress-related...” The
study was apparently published in a hurry because “...
detailed histologic examinations have not been com-
pleted.” Yet the CDC concluded with the authority of
its office that, “...these drugs are not responsible for
the basic immune defects characteristic of AIDS.”
The CDC’s action was exceptional on several grounds:
1) Rather than following its usual practice of report-
ing AIDS information supplied by other researchers
and institutes this time the CDC conducted its own
experimental study on AIDS.
2) The CDC study referenced two Lancet papers as
the initial evidence of a correlation between nitrites
and AIDS. But until then the CDC had not refuted or
attempted to refute publications from others.
3) The CDC’s anonymous investigators exposed
mice to a concentration of nitrites that is orders of
magnitude below that inhaled recreationally 131.
According to a reporter who interviewd one of the
investigators of the CDC study in 1994, “Lewis
explained that, in determining the dose, they had to
adjust it below the level where they were ‘losing’ the
mice...” - a fact that might have been useful to
include in the text of a paper that concluded that,
“drugs are not responsible for ... AIDS” 33°.
4) Considering that T-cell deficiency is the hallmark
of AIDS, it is hard to understand how the CDC could
dismiss “thymic atrophy” in nitrite exposed mice as
“stress related”.
7.3. Misrepresentation offacts, example 2. In an effort
to dissociate the new American drug epidemic from the
new AIDS epidemic the office of the director of AIDS
research of the NIAID, Anthony Fauci, also published
an anonymous paper, “The relationship between the
Human immunodeficiency Virus and the Acquired
Immunodeficiency Syndrome,” 14. The paper claims
that drugs cannot cause AIDS, because AIDS is new
but drug use is old. The NIAID asserts that, “a tem-
poral association between the onset of the extensive use
of recreational drugs and the AIDS epidemic is also
lacking. The wide-spread use of opiates in the United
States has existed since the middle of the 19th century.
... the number of individuals aged 25 to 44 years
reporting current use of marijuana, cocaine, inhalants,
hallucinogens and cigarettes declined between 1974
and 1992, while the AIDS epidemic worsened.”
However, the NIAID’s information is hard to recon-
cile with information from the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, the White House, the Deparment of HHS
Drug Abuse Warning System, the NIDA and even pri-
vate investigators (see Tables 2 and 3, Fig. 2). These and
other sources document that:
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