Does drug use cause AIDS?

[Stephen_Forde]

I know this is a off topic from the usual, but I found this way too interesting. Peter Duesberg gave a presentation on this topic @ the Private Property and Freedom Society 2009 conference. His paper is roughly the same as his presentation.

Our review shows that the chemical-AIDS hypothesis explains all AIDS facts: the non-random distribution of drug-AIDS in the US and Europe, the risk-group-specific AIDS diseases in the US and Europe as consequences of risk-group-specific drugs, the random distribution of malnutrition-AIDS in Africa, the non-contagiousness of chemical AIDS, the absence of natural immunity against chemical AIDS, the lifestyle-dependent onset of AIDS diseases – unrelated to, but typically long after infection by HIV, and the time courses of the AIDS epidemics of the US and Europe as consequences of the drug epidemics.

In addition chemical AIDS proves that HIV is not necessary for even one AIDS-defining disease, because (i) drugs and malnutrition cause drug- and malnutritionspecific AIDS diseases regardless of the presence of HIV, because (ii) in HIV antibody-positives and negatives the risk of developing AIDS is proportional to the degree or lifetime dosage of drug use, and (iii) because all AIDS diseases have been diagnosed in HIV-free AIDS risk groups by AIDS researchers (Duesberg 1993d) and also long before the AIDS era (Stedman’s Medical Dictionary 1982). Thus HIV meets all criteria of a harmless passenger virus, laid out in table 4 and described previously (Duesberg 1994; Duesberg and Rasnick 1998). In this way our proposal resolves the fundamental paradox of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis: the paradox that a latent, noncytopathic and immunologically neutralized retrovirus, that is only present in less than 1 out of 500 susceptible T-cells and rarely expressed in a few of those, would cause a plethora of fatal diseases in sexually active, young men and women. And, that the plethora of diseases attributed to this virus would not show up for 5–10 years after infection.

source

Also he points out the conflict of interest in the peer-review system @ the end.

[Bostwick]

I first heard of him on LRC. His explanation of how the virus theory of AIDS came about is very plausible.

By 1983 AIDS had become big enough in the American and European press to pique the interest of the influential infectious disease establishment, particularly the cancer virus hunters. At that time the virus hunters had been engaged for over a decade in president Nixon’s War on Cancer with unsuccessful attempts to find a human cancer virus (Duesberg 1996b; Fujimura 1996; de Harven 1999). Now they were looking for new diseases that could be attributed to viruses (Duesberg 1987). Perhaps AIDS could at last yield clinically relevant lymphoma-, Kaposi’s sarcoma- or immunodeficiency-viruses (Duesberg 1996b). Indeed, virus hunters from the CDC were the first to alert the public that AIDS may be “transmissible” (Francis et al 1983). A similar alert came from a French virus team, which had discovered a retrovirus in a homosexual man at risk for AIDS, which a year later became the accepted cause of AIDS (Barre-Sinoussi et al 1983). News, that the cause of AIDS may be a virus, and thus transmissible to the general population, immediately set off a national panic that opened the doors for new surveillance programs by the CDC and predictably set off a race among virus hunters for the AIDS virus (Shilts 1987).

According to an international press conference called by the US Secretary of Health and Human Services in Washington DC on 23 April 1984, that race was won by government researchers from the NIH who had found in some AIDS patients antibodies against a new retrovirus closely related to a hypothetical human leukemia virus (Altman 1984). The virus was introduced as fortunate fallout of the failed War on Cancer. The next day the new virus was already termed, the “AIDS virus”, by the New York Times (Altman 1984). Overnight nearly all AIDS researchers dropped the lifestyle-AIDS hypothesis to work on the new “AIDS virus”, which was already endorsed by the US government. The CDC’s director of the Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, James Curran, was the only one who later announced the reason for his conversion to the new “AIDS virus”: “That’s where the money is” (Shilts 1987).

Of course, it should come as a surprise to no one here that government science is anything but scientific. But AIDs scientists’ work is much more remote from the public eye than climate change scientists’.