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Supplement Intro Note: The information on this website is presented
for educational purposes and Intoduction next This document was provided by MICHAEL VERNEY-ELLIOTT introduces the major new paper that forms this issue’s Supplement Peter Duesberg, the world’s foremost retrovirologist, has declared since 1987 that HIV is a conventional retrovirus, without a disease-causing supernumerary gene, is not sexually transmitted, and is principally transmitted by female to offspring. He states that what is called HIV, for these and many other reasons, is not and cannot be the cause of AIDS. He is currently engaged in a debate, principally in this magazine, with other leading scientists as to whether HIV has really ever been proved to exist as an isolated virus, which he believes it has. Even if this is not so, both sides of that debate agree that what is called HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS. Having since 1987 refuted the idea that a human retrovirus can be the cause of AIDS, Duesberg has searched the epidemiological evidence for an alternative cause for the acquired immune deficiency syndrome ("AIDS"). He has propounded the drug-AIDS hypothesis for some time, and in this latest paper he and co-author David Rasnick have presented his arguments in exhaustive detail, with 338 references. The paper is very persuasive. The authors begin by expounding the scientific credo of Richard Feynman, who states that good science will present all the relevant facts concerning an hypothesis, not merely those which support it, and leave the readers to make up their own mind. This means that the true scientist must be his own Devil’s Advocate, and state the con’s as well as the pro’s in presenting a scientific theory. My personal experience of Duesberg is that he has always obeyed this precept, whilst the vast majority of so-called ‘AIDS experts’ have consistently and wilfully presented only the specious arguments which seem to support their frequently illogical theories, sometimes deliberately obfuscating or suppressing contradictory evidence. Duesberg gives a perfect example of this scientific chicanery, citing a paper published by Nature purporting to show AIDS in non-drug-using patients which, in fact, showed nothing of the kind, and all the patients in the study had in fact used recreational drugs. A line on an illustrative graph claimed to represent non-drug users, but the text mentioned no such patients. The line was an artefact, used to support a shaky, flaky piece of research. Even worse, a subsequent independent study of the database used in the paper revealed in the same cohort of patients, 45 HIV negative drug users with AIDS defining diseases. These were not mentioned in the paper, obviously because they would have shown that the drugs caused the diseases and HIV was irrelevant. Unfortunately, this rotten science has prevailed since the beginning of ‘AIDS’, and shows no sign of abating. Space allows for only a few of the many points which particularly struck me in Duesberg’s hypothesis. Duesberg gives a list of diseases known to afflict long-term drug addicts and their babies since an earlier drugs epidemic at the beginning of this century in the USA. "These diseases include immunodeficiency, pneumonia, tuberculosis, dementia, candidiasis, weight loss, diarrhea, fever, night sweats, congenital abnormalities, mouth infections, impotence, epileptic seizures, paranoia, Iymphadenopathy, hemorrhages, hypertension and many others." (12 refs. cited) This looks almost identical to a list of ‘AIDS’ defining diseases. Moreover, "Patients and deaths from drug diseases... show essentially the same sex and age distribution..." (as AIDS). When AIDS first appeared, drug causation was widely suspected and supported by scientists like Blattner, Curran, Friedman-Kien, Goedart and Jaffe, all of whom did a volte face and joined the HIV junta in 1984. Despite the fact that, epidemiologically, drugs are a much more convincing explanation for AIDS than a retroviral infection, these men still show solidarity with an increasingly threadbare scientific theory, "without even offering a refutation of the drug hypothesis." In the best Feynman tradition, Duesberg does not shirk the objection that not all drug users develop AIDS. He illustrates his thesis that "The dose is the poison" by pointing out the following: "In adults it takes about ten years of injecting or oral use of heroin, cocaine and amphetamines to develop tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, irreversible or hardly irreversible weight loss and other drug-induced diseases. [8 refs. cited.] The time lag from initiating a habit of inhaling nitrites to acquire Kaposi’s sarcoma has also been determined to be 7-10 years [4 refs. cited]." The ten year use of drugs is remarkably reminiscent of the embarrassingly elastic ‘HIV incubation’ period. In a particularly telling section, the paper lists 11 examples from the literature of the devastation caused by AZT/nucleoside analogues cynically minimized, wilfully misinterpreted or disregarded by conductors of drug studies. For instance, Samuel Broder, who first pushed AZT as an antiviral drug, when confronted by the 46.4% increase in Iymphoma in patients taking AZT claimed it as a victory for AZT, in that it kept the patients alive long enough for half of them to develop cancer. The dishonesty in failing to admit the link between drug use/addiction and AIDS reaches right up to Government level, as this paper shows. Despite paying lip service to the War Against Drugs, the US govemment restricts their efforts largely to token drug seizures and pursuing dealers. They have consistently failed to stress the illnesses caused by drugs, as has been done in successful campaigns against smoking. As far as AIDS and drug users are concerned, the message has been rather ‘Say no to shared needles’ than ‘Say no to drugs’, (which tragically should include AZT/DNA synthesis inhibitors). The American government for reasons of its own fails to realize that to link the wars against drugs and AIDS would stand a better chance of winning, rather than losing, both. Obviously, to undermine the prevailing view that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS would damage the already tarnished scientific reputations of the "HIV" junta, and to focus on drugs would rouse the ire of powerful drug cartels – both recreational and pharmaceutical. This paper is exhaustively researched, fully referenced and convincingly argued. Anyone interested in the true cause and nature of ‘AIDS’ – Acquired Immunosuppressive Drug Sickness – should read it several times. Duesberg’s hypothesis is testable – studies of heavy drug users, using HIV positive and negative controls, should reveal identical immune deficiencies, disease incidence and early mortality. To date no-one has carried out such a study. It is long overdue.
The war on the new AIDS epidemic has been a complete failure in terms of public health benefits: 50,000 to 75,000 Americans develop AIDS per year and over $8 billion are spent annually on AIDS research and treatment by the US taxpayer alone, but there is no vaccine, and no effective drug, and not one AIDS patient has been cured. It is proposed here that this failure is the responsibility of the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by a virus named HIV. This hypothesis has monopolized AIDS research and treatment since 1984, but it neither explains nor predicts numerous AIDS facts, nor has it produced any public health benefits. In order to solve AIDS we propose here the drug-AIDS hypothesis. The drug hypothesis holds that all American AIDS diseases that exceed their normal low background are caused by the long-term consumption of recreational drugs, anti-HIV/AIDS drugs or both. This hypothesis is based on the only new health risk to emerge during the past 25 years in America and Europe: the drug epidemic. In America the consumers of recreational drugs such as cocaine, amphetamines, nitrite inhalants, and heroin soared from negligible numbers in the 1970s to currently 20 millions, or 8% of the population. In addition, over 200,000 HIV-positives take since 1987 daily prescriptions of inevitably toxic DNA chain-terminators such as AZT and simultaneously consume many other orthodox and unorthodox toxic anti-HIV/AIDS medications. All AIDS facts confirm the drug hypothesis: 1) AIDS is new because the drug epidemic is; 2) over 95% of American AIDS patients are long-term users of recreational and anti-viral drugs, because drugs cause AIDS; 3) 9 out of 10 AIDS cases are males because they consume 90% of the drugs; 4) the age distributions of diseases and deaths from drugs and AIDS are both 25 to 54 years because drugs cause AIDS; 5) babies develop AIDS from sharing intravenous drugs with their mothers during pregnancy; 6) Kaposi’s sarcoma is a homosexual male-specific AIDS disease because male homosexuals use carcinogenic nitrite inhalants as sexual stimulants almost (98%) exclusively; 7) termination of drug use has prevented and has even cured pediatric, male homosexual and intravenous drug-AIDS cases. According to the drug-AIDS hypothesis AIDS is preventable by banning anti-HIV/AIDS drugs and by advertising the medical consequences of recreational drugs. Such a program could be as successful as the campaign that has reduced smoking 40% by advertising the medical consequences of tobacco use. The drug-AIDS hypothesis could save 50,000 to 75,000 lives per year, $8 billion that are annually spent unproductively on AIDS research and therapy based on the virus hypothesis, and much of the $15 billion that is annually spent on "supply control" in the failed War on Drugs by lowering demand with advertisements that drugs cause AIDS. The solution to AIDS and the drug epidemic are as close as a very affordable and testable, independent AIDS hypothesis. Peter Duesberg, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, David Rasnick, Resident AIDS investigator at UC Berkeley, Intoduction next |