Document:Poppers and Propaganda
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The Sunday Times (London)
1 May 1994
If Hansard, the official record of proceedings in Parliament, is anything to go by, homosexual men who use the inhalant drug amyl nitrite to boost their sex lives do not face any increased risks of developing Aids, apart from being more exposed to HIV through having more partners.
This reassurance has been offered in both Houses by health ministers, after The Sunday Times reported new evidence three weeks ago supporting long-standing claims that the drug, marketed as "poppers" and sold widely in gay clubs, discos, shops and through gay newspapers, is an important cause of Aids.
The ministers cited two statistical analyses, published in March last year in Nature and The Lancet, which purported to give poppers the all-clear. In the light of this evidence, they said, no further research was planned.
What they did not say was that both analyses were specifically aimed at silencing Professor Peter Duesberg, a distinguished American molecular biologist and virus expert who has enraged the scientific establishment by arguing that HIV is harmless and that long-term drug abuse, especially of amyl nitrites, is a main cause of the catastrophic collapse of the immune system seen in Aids.
Nor did they mention – indeed, they could not have known – that in the case of Nature, repeated efforts by Duesberg and others to reply to the attacks on him have been frustrated by John Maddox, the journal's editor. Their latest effort, re-analysing data from an eight-year study of homosexual men in San Francisco, was rejected two weeks ago. It reaches conclusions that directly contradict those in the original article. Almost 100% of the men who died had used poppers, and there was a much higher level of general drug use (including heroin and cocaine) among HIV-positive men than their HIV-negative counterparts.
The Lancet study quoted by health ministers to justify their inaction on poppers was published as a "short report". It too dismissed Duesberg's claims, which it described as "a hindrance to public health initiatives".
But as Duesberg pointed out in a letter in The Lancet, 88% of the HIV-positive men in this survey among homosexual men in Vancouver had used nitrites, and up to 100% had used drugs of some sort. Drug use was also widespread in men who did not get Aids, but that may simply mean other factors, such as genetic susceptibility, are involved, as with smoking and cancer.
Poppers are volatile, mutagenic, carcinogenic chemicals, scientifically established as potent inhibitors of the immune system, and causally linked by several studies to Kaposi's sarcoma (KS), a form of cancer characteristic of Aids. They came into widespread use in the gay community a few years before Aids appeared.
In a sane world, faced with the tragic and continuing reality of the Aids epidemic in the gay and drug-abusing communities – and the failure of predictions that the syndrome would soon spread to the sexually active population at large – health authorities would be doing everything possible to alert potential poppers users to the dangers, and funding intensive research efforts to try to establish how much of a contribution these and other drugs may be making to Aids. Instead, they are turning a blind eye to the unlicensed, uncontrolled manufacture and sale of these powerful chemicals.
A kind of collective insanity over HIV and AIDS has gripped leaders of the scientific and medical professions. They have stopped behaving as scientists, and instead are working as propagandists, trying desperately to keep alive a failed theory.
A press release issued by Nature on the original "commentary" – it was not even presented as a scientific paper – was baldly headlined "Drug use does not cause Aids" and declared that the findings "seriously undermine" Duesberg's arguments. To refuse Duesberg and colleagues any right of reply is an act of censorship on one of the most important scientific debates of our time.
Another example of this "science by press release" came last week. The Lancet, attacking what it called "a few maverick researchers and journalists", said a study it had published about Aids in Africa "squelches the mischievous claim of some that HIV on that continent and the Aids that results from it are unimportant".
The study – whose key results were first announced last June, and discussed in this newspaper last October – found far higher death rates among HIV-positive villagers in rural Uganda than in those who tested HIV-negative. But it failed to address scientific concerns that the HIV test has never been validated as specifying the presence of a virus. It simply detects the presence of certain proteins, and there is much evidence that these may enter the bloodstream as a result of the immune system becoming stressed by a wide variety of insults apart from HIV, including drugs, malnutrition, repeated blood transfusions and chronic infections of the kind common in Africa.
In fact, the study strengthens these concerns, for during the entire two-year period that it lasted only five Aids cases were diagnosed. On that basis, a whole continent is said to be doomed. When will this madness end?
© 1994 by Neville Hodgkinson
Originally published by Times Newspapers Ltd.
