Læknaneminn - 01.04.1997, Page 125

The drug-AIDS hypothesis *
1) The American drug epidemic of the “middle of
the 19th century” had declined after World War I and
completely ended during World War II 52.
2) The percentage of drug users at the peak of the
early American drug epidemic was significantly smaller
than the current one, namely 250,000 addicts out of
75 million Americans in 1900 52,55 compared to 20
million addicts out of 250 million now 51,52.
3) The amounts consumed in the early epidemic
were much lower, about 11 tons of cocaine for 90 mil-
lion Americans in 1906, compared to about 400 tons
for 250 million now (see 3.).
4) Before World War I, nearly a third of all
Americans died from pneumonia, tuberculosis and
other AIDS defining diseases, and the average age at
death of Americans was about the same as that of AIDS
patients now ',331. Thus, drug-AIDS mortality would
have been hidden in the normal background mortality
from the dominant infectious diseases of that time.
It follows that either the NIAID, or many others
including the Bureau of Jusice Statistics, the
Department of HHS, the NIDA, the White House as
well as non-governmental sources misrepresent the
facts. Even the major source of drug use in the
N IAID’s anonymous report, David Courtwright’s
Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America Before
1940, documents that the number of American opium
addicts had dwindled to a few thousand, mostly doc-
tors, by 1940, and that drug arrests had fallen below
3000 per year by that time 54.
7.4. Different standards of verification for HIV and
drugs. Since infectious HIV is virtually never
detectable in AIDS patients, AIDS epidemiologists
accept antibodies against the virus as evidence for the
virus 26,31,47. However, antibodies signal virus neutral-
ization - the reason why infectious HIV is unde-
tectable in most AIDS patients. Thus evidence for a
prior defeat of the virus with antiviral immunity, is
taken as evidence for a current or future viral disease.
However, the principle of vaccination teaches just the
opposite: antiviral immunity is the only current and
future protection against viruses. The search for HIV
is further biased in favor of being positive, because
antibodies against many other microbes will register as
anti-HIV antibodies due to the inherent false positive
rate of all antibody tests 48’300’301. Thus antibodies are
grossly exaggerated standards for the presence of a
virus.
AIDS epidemiologists rely only on “self-reporting”
to determine recreational drug use, instead of using
standard drug tests 229,275. This epidemiological honor
systenr is certain to minimize drug-AIDS connections
because people tend to forget and to deny socially
unacceptable behavior like drug use. Indeed, denial is
one of the first indications of all addictions. According
to drug treatment experts: “deception is the rule in the
illicit drug market place...” 126. Thus, unverified ques-
tionnaires are underestimates of drug use.
Moreover, comparisons between HIV and other pos-
sible causes of AIDS are 100% biased in favor of HIV
because of the HlV-based AIDS defmition (see 2.).
According to this definition HIV/AIDS researchers are
entitled to exclude HlV-free AIDS cases from their
AIDS statistics. Thus, citing 100% HIV-AIDS corre-
lations as proof for the HIV hypothesis is not only mis-
leading, but is in fact deceptive 35.
It is, therefore, not surprising that even the most
popular recreational drugs of a given risk group, like
nitrite inhalants among male homosexuals (Table 5),
lose out against HIV when studied by HIV/AIDS epi-
demiologists. Indeed, based on the presumptuous
HIV-AIDS definition and the double standards of ver-
ification for drug use and HIV, two articles have
recently refuted “Duesberg’s drug-use hypothesis” 80
(see 7.5.)■ One of these was even commissioned as a
commentary by Nature 80, and was sponsored by the
NIAID, the other was published in The Lancet 105. For
further emphasis the articles were accompanied by
international press releases to enhace their impact on
unsuspecting non-AIDS professionals and the general
public 221'332-334.
An unbiased search for the cause or causes of AIDS
would first defme AIDS diseases clinically, and then
report the coincidences of all the suspects.
7.5. Omission offacts and controls. But refutation of
the drug hypothesis by the Nature commentary was
not only based on questionable standards of verifica-
tion, but also on the omission of crucial facts and con-
trols 80. For example:
1) The authors proudly display, on a blue colored
background, a graph of “drug-free”, HlV-positive
AIDS patients losing theirT cells over time. The graph
LÆKNANEMINN 123 1-tbl. 1997, 50. árg.