AIDS and Intravenous Drug Use

The name AIDS is an accusation. It implies punishment for sin--homosexuality and promiscuity. AIDS is a moral judgement masquerading as a scientific name, which is at the very heart of discrimination against the infected. At the bottom are drug users, victims of the War On Drugs, condemned to contract AIDS by using contaminated syringes necessitated by scarcity resulting from restrictive policies. A rational way to control HIV is to liberalize drug paraphernalia policies as in Europe. The U.S. has not taken this simple step, thus unleashing the AIDS epidemic among drug users, their sexual partners, and neonates. While this policy neglect can be understood in the context of AIDS prevention dominated by moral, political, and religious ideologies rather than epidemiological facts, there are critical racial implications. The ethnic divide separating the white researchers and the infected who belong to minorities has fuelled comparisons of AIDS with the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study and some preventive strategies have been called genocidal plots. Recent research indicating the ineffectiveness of bleach to disinfect paraphernalia has exposed the deadly consequences of a nonchalant attitude to research and compromises for political expediency.

M. DANIEL FERNANDO is an anthropologist who has worked in the area of AIDS and drug use since 1987 in both counseling and research. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Since 1990 he has worked as a street ethnographer in HIV/AIDS prevention projects among intravenous drug users in New Jersey and New York. He has published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, AIDS and Public Policy Journal, and Transforming Anthropology.