AIDS Inc and Meth

[Guest guest]

I am attaching a very interesting report that some of you may want to glance through if you have friends dealing with TINA (meth) I come accross so many people who email me after getting infected while doing tina and letting their guards down. And the feel they have no where to go without being judged. Many are in their 20's and lost. I truly think meth is worse than anything else we have seen in our community in the US and Europe. This report gives a harsh view of what the writer thinks are the pitfalls of the current prevention message. I am agreeing completely with this report, but wanted to show it to you all for food for thought. It is long, but interesting to read for those who have the time.

AID$ INC. UNCOVERED

By the Founder of www.lifeormeth.com

When AIDS drugs arrived in 1996, many Western gay-run HIV agencies shifted gear and began pursuing HIV management over HIV prevention. Morphing from compassionate responders into dispassionate, unaccountable, state-funded quangos, they're now dominated by self-serving AIDS careerists who use political correctness, media spin, lies and deceit to silence truth while indifferently presiding over the now seemingly irreversible decline in the sexual health and wellbeing of gay men, effectively enabling the spread of major health threats like crystal meth and HIV that they are appointed to prevent...

1: THE BLOOD OF MY BROTHERS

"FIRST they IGNORE you, then they RIDICULE you, then they FIGHT you, then you WIN."

~ Mahatma Gandhi

HOW DID I come to create LIFE OR METH? Not so long ago, come World AIDS Day, I would readily throw cash into the gay-run HIV charity sector's collection tins to support "the cause", because I believed a healthy community to be an empowered one. I still do. But I also believed that the people drawn to working in these bastions of future hope embodied selfless devotion, going about their roles with the community's interests and health needs overriding all other considerations.

Then, around 2000, I decided to knock on a few of their doors, beginning in the US, to enquire why nothing was being done to combat the ugly, deathly spectre of crystal meth, which was silently but stealthily pervading gay communities in the major coastal cities. One by one, friends and acquaintances I had known during many Stateside trips throughout the 1990s were being entrapped by meth's seductive high, and its devastating low was destroying their livelihoods, inflicting soul-destroying depressions and manias, triggering suicidal tendencies and inducing the compulsion for multiple, disinhibited, unsafe, turbo-charged sexual encounters.

Anecdotal and circumstantial evidence had been stacking up for several years, and on the West Coast for far longer. Yet, I was arriving at the uneasy conclusion that this new epidemic in our midst was being allowed to spread unhindered because no one, it seemed, was speaking out or acting against it!

My worst fears were realized when, one after the other, the same mental defense mechanisms whirred and clicked into place as the barely considered responses of each AIDS agency and community health organisation I approached amounted to nothing. In dull-eyed unison each routinely condemned and dismissed my anecdotal evidence out of hand, demanding immediate sight of non-existent scientific proof and statistics to quantify my claims, disinterested as they were in investigating these themselves. Surely it was their duty to quantify the risk posed by crystal meth; to establish all possible outcomes and their probabilities; and to then act on the findings and disseminate the appropriate information to enable their communities to make informed decisions?

"Condemnation without investigation is the highest form of ignorance."

~ Albert Einstein

How would they have reacted, I wondered, had I demanded proof that the HIV virus itself causes AIDS? After all, their multi-million dollar industry is built on this foundation, notwithstanding the fact that scientific evidence has yet to emerge to support this universally accepted hypothesis. Why, then, were they hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty in claiming that meth is no more phychologically or physiologically dangerous than any other party drug, despite the personal experiences of thousands to the contrary? And why, in a spiraling delirium of left-brain denial, were they summarily rubbishing all suggestion of a link between crystal meth use and HIV infection?

Was meth such an unattractive subject for research funding that the leading gay men’s HIV and sexual health organisations had developed an automatic filter that rendered it non-existent in their mindsets?

Or was there an altogether more profound, perhaps even sinister reason why they were ignoring, and therefore enabling, the greatest facilitator of the HIV virus to emerge since the advent of AIDS itself? Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that they were not interested in evidence at all; only their own concrete, routinely parroted song-sheet theories...

"It is dangerous to rely on the lack of a ‘smoking gun' in terms of the exact mechanism to deny the need to recognise and change one's behavior. This is analogous to the public outcry when I and others suggested in 1982 that gay men refrain from unprotected anal intercourse until we knew what was causing AIDS, as we definitely knew that unprotected anal sex was the leading route of infection or exposure to whatever the causal factor would turn out to be."

~ Dr. Ostrow, MD PhD [Chicago MACS Centre]

I was being asked to prove something as abstract as a psychological motivation when it was overwhelmingly obvious that, for many users, meth erases the memory of every safe sex message that ever existed, in a way that no other drug comes close to replicating while acting as an overpowering aphrodisiac that heightens every sensation and taboo, making the average user want to hump every person and lamp post in sight for hours and days on end, not stopping until his brain tires of producing so many happy chemicals that it will just give up, inducing a dark, desolate chasm of despair fueled by panic attacks and psychotic episodes that may cost him his job, life savings, home, friends and loved ones, or see him restrained in a psychiatric ward or OD'ed in a gutter somewhere, a slab of concrete at the local morgue his final resting place. Why, I despaired, was this such a hard sell?

Then I was shown the door by the leading gay men's sexual health charities in the UK – The Terrence Higgins Trusts (THT) and GMFA (“Gay Men Fighting AIDSâ€) - where meth was starting to make its ubiquitous presence felt. Would I now face the prospect of my own city, London, becoming a "crystal town" in a few short years? Its thriving, bustling scene reduced to a ghost town with the rest of the UK and Europe following close behind? Or take whatever action necessary to pre-empt its arrival by alerting the UK’s gay community that meth is like no other drug in its propensity to wreak havoc and destroy lives? I had witnessed enough carnage and suffering elsewhere to know that I could not follow their appalling example, stick my head in the sand and wait for scientific evidence to catch up with what was happening right here, right now.

"A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury."

~ Stuart Mill [Philosopher]

Even were such "proof" to finally emerge, what guarantee, then, that the findings would be accurate and not misrepresented or distorted? After all, habitual, speeding meth users that such research seeks to identify fall largely outside of the reach of face-to-face interviews and lengthy questionnaires that require focused attention spans and coherent answers. By the nature of their addiction, meth users tend either to be unaware or in denial that they have a problem or just plain dishonest about the extent of their usage, yielding unreliable data to be seized upon by dishonest HIV agencies to prove that no problem exists, thereby evading their duty to act.

To focus on this work I sold my publishing business and, on April 15, 2001, flew to "viral hot-spots" of America's gay crystal meth epidemic in Palm Springs, then LA and Miami Beach before settling in New York – the epicentre of the affliction - for much of that year, witnessing for myself the social decay meth was wreaking on its gay community. I stayed with a friend in his downtown apartment from where I saw the towers burn and implode on 9/11; someone I had known for years as being outgoing and exuberant, and just the latest of many to have withdrawn into the meth haze, contracting HIV in the process and restructuring his lifestyle exclusively around his musty, dimly-lit, black-draped apartment strewn with home-delivered fast food cartons, a sparkling new 17" Mac to herald the arrival of 24/7 instant online cable connection, assorted meth paraphernalia and a revolving door of internet hook-ups of all shapes and sizes. This set-up would afford me a unique and disturbing insight into a hitherto secret, underground world...

I prepared my groundwork over the following year and, on November 1, 2002, LIFE OR METH was born. The site originally set out to warn and educate the London gay community about the oncoming storm but quickly became embraced and regarded globally as a powerfully truthful resource, striking a chord with meth users themselves and providing the impetus and wake-up call for over a quarter of a million people, to date, to quit - or at least want to quit - using.

LIFE OR METH's independent (i.e. unrestrained and unrestricted) global voice would, however, preclude it from funding at local level, while international organisations like The Elton AIDS Foundation snubbed my requests for funding on the basis that, to quote, "crystal is not an AIDS-related concern". It soon become glaringly apparent that in order to apply to the main sources of funding - or even just to achieve charity status - I was expected to fall into line and practise political correctness as my main religion, or be refused help and nailed to the cross simply for speaking the truth.

I, for one, was not about to sell my soul and buy into this monumental fraud of blind conformity, even if it meant going against established convention and using every last penny I owned to get the truth about meth out there and, perhaps, even save a few lives...

So next I sold my London home to support this near full-time, cost-intensive campaign, which required endless research, distribution of fliers, posters, adverts and interviews in the gay media, drumming up awareness in the mainstream press, endless petitioning of the Home Office for crystal's UK reclassification from Class B to Class A (finally accomplished January 19, 2007), and traveling from city to city to keep a finger on the pulse of this deadly new virus that was insidiously and indiscriminately infiltrating urban gay communities globally.

10,000 hits later, in May 2003, Marc Cohen of the UFA (United Foundation of AIDS) invited me to Miami to oversee North America's first national meth campaign, Meth=Death; a provocatively confronting yet effective poster inspired by LIFE OR METH’s upfront approach. I was then contacted by Stop AIDS in San Francisco and other enlightened gay men's health groups - including Positively Healthy (UK), Positive Action (San Diego), Legacy (Houston) and, more recently, CAAMA (Sydney) - and a number of "meth task forces" across America who work in tandem with such organisations to confront the meth problem head-on. All shared LIFE OR METH's ethos and were keen to get realistic, hardhitting prevention messages that sought, above all else, to stigmatise crystal meth swiftly into the public domain, devoid of the arrogance, self-interest, vanity, square thinking and obtuseness that were clearly roadblocks to effective action among many of the bureaucratised gay-run AIDS bodies ("AID$ Inc.").

"In the fall of 2005, Legacy staff conducted interviews with current meth users, recovering meth users and those at high-risk of becoming meth users to determine what types of messages were needed to alert people to the dangers. Participants said that a campaign should 'de-glam Tina' and provide a message that meth is not 'cool'. Others suggested shocking illustrations with a strong anti-meth message."

~ Roland [Director of Education at Legacy]

As a result, four of LIFE OR METH's own posters were used by Legacy to promote meth awareness in Houston. Elsewhere:

• UFA’s Meth=Death poster legitimised the stigmatisation of meth and stirred others across the US to take decisive action. In demand by everyone from high school teachers to CMA group meetings and Sheriffs' offices, the poster was the catalyst for all Stateside anti-meth campaigns that followed;

• Stop AIDS' San Francisco campaigns around living with AIDS (AIDS Is No Picnic) and meth (Crystal Mess) - vividly depicting the physically ravaging effects of full-blown AIDS and meth dependency - contributed to the largest decline in HIV and meth use among men who have sex with men (MSM) of all major US cities;

• LIFE OR METH has itself become the most effective global meth resource for MSM. Two-thirds of meth users accessing it have been inspired or empowered to quit - over 340,000 visitors to date! With 200,000+ hits in the UK alone, LIFE OR METH has been at the forefront of impeding the largescale advance of meth into London and other major European cities.

"It is no secret that a number of the groups receiving funds for what is called health education are in fact using their new status as government-approved and publicly funded bodies to promote a homosexual political agenda. To look only at the most notorious case, in an expose of the Terrence Higgins Trust in August 1990, [medical] journalist Oliver Gillie wrote in The Independent of an organisation rent with political discord and pursuing political correctness at the expense of medical accuracy, and sometimes of common sense."

~ Ron Aitken [Free Life]

Those who work within the AIDS industry have been conditioned by political correctness to regard those with the disease only as victims, regardless of how they contracted the virus, since the early days of the epidemic when gay men were afraid to get tested for fear that they would be demonised and driven underground. Supposedly intended to counter HIV stigma, politically correct protocols, curriculums, “sensitivity training†programs and quality assurance measures were set up to ensure that HIV sector staff and volunteers were totally non-judgmental, many of which exist to this day. When a problem like crystal manifests, it is placed into the same mold and the same technocratic, non-stigmatising approach to users of meth and the drug itself are applied, effectively serving to legitimise and normalise the problem.

"I remember when we first started to consider an anti-meth campaign and I saw some of the non-stigmatising 'manby-panby' campaigns. I remember saying that this isn't sex we are discussing, this is an illegal substance. I would never want to shame someone for having sex; a biological function and human nature. However, I should be able to shame someone for using an illegal substance, shouldn't I?"

~ Roland [Legacy Community Services]

Inevitably, forward-thinking health awareness groups are incessantly discredited by AID$ Inc. for their non-PC efforts to remedy the damage caused by AID$ Inc.’s failure to tackle meth - and, by association, HIV - effectively. Despite our notable successes they unceasingly criticise our methods, particularly the use of realistic, in-your-face imagery designed to deglamorise meth and, not least, the HIV virus which, they claim, serve only to demonise meth users and HIVers alike; a patently patronising response that lacks common sense, paints the target audience as stupid, and hails from the same school of politically correct idiocy that has seen the word "Christmas" airbrushed from the American vocabulary and a British hospital ban hot cross buns at Easter so as not to offend non-Christians! And despite the fact that recovering meth users themselves often testify how graphic images of meth-ravaged individuals gave them the impetus they needed to awaken to their addiction and repair their shattered lives.

"Shock has a place in public health awareness where complacency has triggered significant increases in high-risk behaviours... It’s actually the argument that such campaigns DON’T work which is unsubstantiated."

~ Col [sydney Star Observer]

By not stigmatising crystal, a climate of tolerance and acceptance is fostered; one that fuels the perception of meth as cool and chic, and contributes to peer pressure to use or risk being ridiculed and isolated from the "action". It was only after the arrival of campaigns like Meth=Death and San Francisco's Crystal Mess that "Tina" – which, by 2003, had become so thoroughly interwoven into the fabric of North America's gay social scene that everyone, it seemed, was using - became universally frowned upon and socially unacceptable. The same is also true of the HIV virus, for which hard-hittting campaigns which shocked gay men into practising safe sex in the 1980s/early 1990s have long been superseded by lame ads that blatantly sexualise and legitimise the virus, paving the way for the open sale of bareback videos, a social climate in which the online solicitation of "raw sex" and "bug chasing" is common currency and, inevitably, record rates of HIV infection.

"Rising infection rates...suggest that polite ads simply do not work. Anything less than graphic, in-your-face messages pale next to a Nike, GAP, or Harley-son ad. AIDS is an ugly disease, and we have to get down and dirty with our ad campaigns and prevention efforts if we're going to staunch this epidemic."

~ [HIV Stops With Me]

2: TRUTH ISN’T JUDGMENT

THE SAN FRANCISCO Department of Public Health reported new HIV infections among MSM citywide were 20% lower in 2006 than in 2001, due to the city's graphic, upfront campaigning. During the same five-year period, new HIV cases in London - which shuns such campaigns - soared by 58%.

Indeed, so effective have upfront campaigns been at reducing HIV infections among gay men in San Francisco that the epidemic has been demoted to endemic status by the city's leading health officials. Likewise, the number of HIV- men in the city who use crystal meth halved between 2003 and 2006.

“Truth itself is very stigmatising. Some people call that wagging your finger, but it’s just gay men looking out for each other.â€

~ Staley [AIDS/crystal meth activist]

Our groups' singling out of crystal when it is AID$ Inc. policy to maintain that all drugs are equally potentially dangerous, period - even though meth possesses unique chemical properties that sets it far apart from "recreational" drugs like ecstasy and ketamine - is another convenient excuse for them to look the other way and do nothing. Where less harmful drugs are concerned, scare campaigns fail because the message does not equate with the experience of most users – London’s “GHB = Liquid suicide†campaign being a case in point - whereas harder drugs demand a hard-line approach because a far higher proportion of users identify with their downside.

The famous UK campaign that centred on the death of teenager Leah Betts - who drowned drinking too much water while experimenting with ecstasy - backfired spectacularly because most young people know that a few ecstasy tablets won’t kill you or inflict severe damage. By contrast, a 22-minute video depicting the transformation of Whitear - from a bright teenager to a 21-year-old ravaged by heroin addiction and circulated to schools three years after her death - caused shockwaves that reverberate to this day.

In December 2006 I alerted Gaydar - the UK's leading cruise website - that some profiles were blatantly soliciting others to "meth-up and fuck raw" and to attend weekend long meth-fuelled sex parties. I suggested it consider implementing banners pointing members to graphic information about crystal and the potential risks from which to make informed choices should they come into contact with meth from others they meet online, as Manhunt.net has long done.

Gaydar then consulted the self-appointed "experts" of gay men's sexual health in London, The Terrence Higgins Trust and GMFA, who said in one voice that the problem was overstated and no action was necessary. However, a central London STI clinician on the front line was then consulted who informed Gaydar that, contrary to the lie being spun by the so-called gay men's sexual health charities, worrying numbers of seroconverting MSM were citing meth as a prime factor. A meeting was arranged at Gaydar HQ at which I was invited to argue the case for the site to run a high-profile meth awareness campaign, and where, on 9 February 2007, I found myself up against a treacherous wall of resistance from an alliance of sexual health staffers, including THT spin doctor Will Nutland and GMFA's Hodson, who tried to jeopardise my case at every turn citing out-of-date statistics and meaningless jargon, all the while obfuscating wildly in a seemingly desperate bid to prove no threat existed.

Nevertheless I won the argument and succeeded in convincing Gaydar to sanction a graphic banner campaign with LIFE OR METH's involvement, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Its corporate obligation to refer only to government-sanctioned public information channels meant that its members' sole source of meth information would be contained within a generic A-Z drugs website touted at the meeting by THT and GMFA, which Gaydar's meth banners would, in theory, click through to. Surely, I argued, such information would only be obscured and trivialised if sandwiched between less addictive and harmful drugs, and that meth required a site in its own right? However, despite “Drugfucked†being commissioned with public funding with a launch date set for Summer 2007 it didn't materialise until May 2008, while Gaydar as of August 2008 has reneged on its vow to display crystal meth banners of any shape or form.

Such disregard to its social duty is all the more staggering when considering that by a perverse twist of fate, one day after the heated meeting at its offices, Gaydar’s chairman and co-founder Frisch killed himself somersaulting off the balcony of his eighth floor London penthouse while intoxicated from a week-long drugs binge!

15 months earlier, the UKC (UK Coalition of People Living with HIV and AIDS) had received thousands of pounds of public money to establish a "benchmark" on meth use in London's gay community - funds the then cash-strapped and now defunct charity was later discovered to have largely diverted elsewhere - around the same time its project co-ordinator, Jack Summerside, told The ish Herald: "Some of the claims about [meth] are straight out of the 18th century and what people were saying about drinking gin. Every drug that comes out is claimed to be more addictive, uniquely more harmful and presenting more uniform social dangers than all drugs it follows."

LIFE OR METH retaliated, telling the Herald: “Agencies like the UKC, THT and GMFA are not taking meth seriously enough. They are part of the cause of the epidemic to come by not acting soon enough. Meth is deadly, end of story." The UKC, incidentally, was liquidated in July 2007 following the discovery of the misappropriation of several hundred thousand pounds of HIV funds by its disgraced Chief Executive, Steve Bitti. [see Statistics and Lies]

"Mind manipulation techniques like neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, are employed in language to engineer consensus. NLP is a technique of using words to reprogram the [mind] to accept another perception of reality (i.e. the consensus agreed by the manipulators); a prefabricated, “politically correct†blanket “popâ€, “opinionâ€, “view†or “take†upon a particular issue of general interest which is designed to preclude further consideration, analysis or investigation of the issue in question. In other words, a “collectivised†mental position which is never to be questioned."

~ H. Hoffman [Manufacturing Orwellian Consent]

Designed ostensibly to suppress diverse opinion and freedom of expression, political correctness is used by large, often powerful bodies for their own ends to spin, twist and reverse truth to bolster counter-productive agendas and destructive policies, using smears, lies and bullying tactics to drag people into line. Political correctness’s most notable characteristic is its total intolerance for any viewpoint but its own.

"Political correctness is first and foremost an attack on free speech, clear thinking and discussion...perpetrated by the left in politics as a cover for their flawed ideology - a sort of cultural Marxism. By cloaking their strange ideas under the cover of not wishing to offend anyone, they try to bypass debate and give a 'received wisdom' which mustn't be questioned. And anyone who disagrees with this 'received wisdom' must therefore be a really nasty person and deserves to be ostracised..."

~ Politicallyincorrect.me.com

“Political correctness is an ideology that classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism, and makes believers feel that no dissent should be tolerated.â€

~ Browne [british author]

Where AID$ Inc. is concerned, speaking honestly about the state of, and threats to, public sexual health has become an Orwellian thought crime, wherein being frank and open about the dangers of HIV and/or crystal meth is equated with moralising and fear-mongering.

Politically correct AIDS zealots insist that HIVers must not be "demonised" or their feelings offended and so they demonise truth itself to cover up their failures, incompetence and negligence. Those who do stigmatise public health threats are instantly vilified, shouted down and labeled judgmental and their deglamorising, realistic campaigns dismissed as scare tactics even though they are proven, time and again, to be the most effective forms of prevention.

"There's an acute difference between being judgmental and being truthful, and if the AIDS lobby can't grasp that simple concept in order to save lives then, frankly, they shouldn't be in receipt of public funds."

~ Anon [former GMHC worker]

Television ads for speeding are designed to shock with maximum impact because they make people pause, think and take stock of the carnage their recklessness behind the wheel might is capable of causing. There would be uproar if such campaigns sought to legitimise reckless drivers on the pretext that stigmatisation would only, to quote the PC lie, “drive them undergroundâ€. So why shouldn't at risk and vulnerable gay men be entitled to reflect on the potentially devastating consequences of using hard drugs like meth via well co-ordinated and hardhitting campaigns, instead of reflexively and obliviously ingesting the most dangerous letter in the drug alphabet amid a climate of thinly-veiled acceptance that is encouraged, in part, by the PC lobby?

Following the success of its last hardhitting anti-smoking campaign, which resulted in 60,000 people kicking their deadly habit, the UK government announced that from 1st October 2008, a series of 15 "gruesome" images that highlight the harmful effects of smoking will start to appear on cigarette packets, each accompanying text warnings about smoking-related diseases. The charity, Cancer Research UK, estimates the images could help an additional 10,000 smokers in England to quit, but - in much the same way that HIV charities claim that HIVers are stigmatised by graphic HIV prevention campaigns - the tobacco industry’s lobby group, Forest, insanely countered that smokers will be "victimised" by the life-saving messages.

In Australia, graphic health warnings on cigarette packs and aggressive campaigns that demonised tobacco resulted in calls to its national Quitline doubling in 2006.

"There hasn't been a decent HIV campaign [in the UK] for years and the 1980s adverts with tombstones still stick in people's minds... I'm sure anyone with HIV would say there should be more negative campaigns. Some of my patients would say: 'I wish there was more warning as I'd have thought about things more.'... Perhaps if images such as the tombstone had been in the back of their minds they'd have used a condom."

~ Dr. Christian n [Television medical expert and GP with an MSc in sexual health and HIV]

"I don't think that evidence bears out that hardhitting adverts work alone, right down to the government's multi-million pound smoking advert with the fishhooks in mouths. And showing tombstones and people dying of AIDS doesn't make people stop barebacking."

~ Mark [spin doctor for the THT, which receives millions of pounds to prevent HIV and provide services to those infected with HIV]

[Note: In the UK, the number of smokers has been in freefall for may years thanks to graphic ad campaigns, and hardhitting HIV campaigns in the late 1980s reduced infection rates to their lowest level]

In light of a successful anti-meth campaign across the US state of Montana - whose confronting approach slashed usage rates by 35% among teens and a massive 75% in adults, changed perceptions among teenagers (87% said peers who tried meth would face disapproval) and cut meth-related crime by around 53% - plans in Australia to spend $30 million of a $150m budget allocated to tackling hard drugs on a "terrifying" meth awareness campaign culminated last year in a graphic TV commercial outlining the potentially dire consequences of dallying with meth.

The ad emulates the no-holds approach of Australia's 1987 Grim Reaper campaign, which was widely criticised at the time as being melodramatic and alarmist but proved resoundingly successful at curbing the spread of AIDS. "Ice destroys lives, it tears families apart," says the ad, which realistically depicts an office worker unable to sleep after smoking meth; a man flying into a psychotic rage in a hospital; a young woman compulsively picking at her skin; and a young man fighting with his mother. The Australian National Council on Drugs advised the Federal Government on the campaign. Its chairman, Herron, maintains that while the ads are graphic, the information is based on fact, not on hype. "I think you've got to take the gloves off," he said.

"We now have a perverse situation where the NSW Government is paying ACON (The AIDS Council of NSW) over $8 million a year to talk down meth with a modality of 'don't stigmatise/demonise the drug and alienate users', while the Feds [have spent] $30m to scare everyone's pants off!"

~ Shayne Chester [CAAMA]

In the UK, political correctness runs amok within an HIV sector that has actively resisted raising the alarm about the potential dangers associated with using meth while being vocal in its criticism of those who do take a stand.

"In the UK, the absence of much discourse on crystal meth has seen scare approaches being used by the creators of LIFE OR METH - a website that uses extreme accounts of the impact of crystal meth - an approach that Reagan with her "just say no" mantra would be likely to support."

~ The Terrence Higgins Trust [New Prevention Technologies]

Based on its atrocious track record, it far behooves The Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) to do what it accuses LIFE OR METH of doing and pass judgment on the efforts of those who are working for little financial renumeration to raise awareness about threats to public health that it downplays or ignores entirely. THT conveniently forgets that all HIV campaigns, some of its own included, were hardhitting and "extreme" in the 1980s, not unlike the long overdue Australian TV meth campaign, instilling in many the need to play safe; messages that embedded deep into that generation's collective psyche and served to keep many, myself - a sexually-adventurous teenager - included, HIV- to this day, and ultimately resulting by the early 1990s in the lowest rate of HIV infection on record.

How many of my peers have subsequently seroconverted in the wake of HIV campaigns wrapped in cotton wool that have sought to downplay those stark messages of old and served instead to legitimise and sexualise the virus? And what of today's emerging generation of sexually active gay men? Had I been a sexually active teenager these last few years I have no doubt that in the HIV-friendly environment that now exists thanks to the shameful PC AIDS lobby, I would have been exposed to HIV many times over...

The UK Conservative party leader, Cameron, invoked the memory of the UK's 1985 AIDS tombstone ad in 2007 to highlight how the dearth of effective campaigns that "scared us all to death" have contributed to soaring rates of public health epidemics, ranging from sexual diseases to obesity. In July 2008 he went further by stating that obese people, alcoholics and drug addicts should take responsibility for their conditions. "We talk about people being at risk of obesity instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise," he said, citing this approach as a symptom of an overly politically correct society in which people are afraid of "appearing judgmental" on social issues. By the same rationale, HIV charities should stop referring to gay men as being "at risk of HIV" and talk instead about gay men who are wilfully reckless or inadequately informed about the risks they are taking with their health.

In January 2008, gay men themselves made their voices heard loud and clear when 82% of the UK Pink Paper’s readers voted in an online survey for harder-hitting HIV campaigns.

The majority of gay men who want to see harder-hitting HIV campaigns are not, as AID$ Inc. claim, demanding the return of tombstones or icebergs in an age where HIV is not an automatic death sentence, even though it remains an incurable, terminal condition. They just want to see honest, truthful messages that convey the many pitfalls of living with the condition; reinforce the message that a life without HIV is a life best lived; and regardless of how such messages may or may not be perceived by HIVers themselves, most of whom understood fully the risks they were taking in that reckless moment - or many reckless moments - of madness, and who would no doubt be among the most vociferous in welcoming such campaigns.

Surely the desire to prevent just one more gay man seroconverting must override the risk of hurting another HIVer's feelings? There are ways to conjure up such messages without invoking the fear of death or offending the sensibilities of HIVers, but such a radical approach requires imagination, creativity, determination of will and strength of spirit; human qualities that political correctness by its very nature seeks to destroy as it injects its insidious doctrine of soulless, bland uniformity into everything it touches and curses...

"So long as a campaign is directed at those genuinely at high risk of infection, there's nothing wrong with employing harder-hitting tactics to induce a bit of fright. If that protects health and saves lives, then frankly, the end justifies the means, and we shouldn't shy away from it."

~ Gill [body Count: How they turned AIDS into a Catastrophe]

Nowhere, of course, does LIFE OR METH advocate a proselytising "Just say no" approach, wag a judgmental finger or seek to demonise meth users; a fallacy often perpetuated by patronising, science/theory/logic-driven, out of touch critics of our work whose robot-like minds are incapable of comprehending the spiritually decimating impact of crystal on our world and so fail to grasp the reasoning for, or meaning of, the empowering, holistic approach needed to penetrate and unravel the heart of the problem. One which this site embraces.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift
and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honours the servant
and has forgotten the gift.â€

- Albert Einstein

"Neurologists have identified part of the brain that defines us as human and allows emotion and intuition to work in tandem with logic to solve moral dilemmas... This component is one among several that contribute to our wisdom and humanity, [indicating] that purely rational accounts of moral judgments do not describe all the possible conditions humans face."

~ [The Times, London, March 22, 2007]

Emotion and intuition are qualities frowned upon within bureaucratised HIV agencies mandated to safeguard public health, which is why they remain obstinate and righteous even in the face of great suffering. Treatment of a habitual meth user necessitates thinking outside of the box and applying an empowering approach to encourage him towards self-respecting behaviours and abstinence, which involves providing the hard, non-sugar-coated facts of the consequences of his addiction and encouraging him to explore the underlying issues that define his compulsive behaviour. But, in their scramble for a scientific/rational solution (i.e. one devoid of emotion or intuition), the autocratic, knee-jerk response of PC-driven AIDS agencies has instead conspired to promote a victim mentality and maintain the user in his addiction in the defeatist guise of "harm reduction".

"Harm reduction is totally inappropriate to a drug of meth's pharmacological uniqueness. It is a modality designed by academics who seek to advocate on behalf of those that they can only understand theoretically. And it is costing lives."

~ Shayne Chester

"In the gay community, we censor ourselves. We have to start being responsible, by telling the truth, and it's not pretty. We've got to wake up."

~ Jay Corcoran [Director, Rock Bottom]

Even when such organisations do act, however, time and again they will glamorise and even “sex up†the problem, such is their aversion to stigmatising it and telling the simple truth. For example:

• THT's token contribution to crystal awareness in the UK - a flier/booklet depicting two muscled action men figures in an explicit, penetrative embrace, accompanied by a long list of the enticing reasons why MSM are seduced into using alongside only a few of the less serious side effects - clearly promotes meth as a 'wonder sex drug' rather than one that should be avoided. Indeed, a participant in the UKC's aforementioned benchmark study into meth use in London commented: "My interest [in meth]'s been raised by the gay press. They put out their warning and I'm afraid it has the opposite effect: it makes me curious. They put this [meth flier] on the cover of QX [magazine] - it told you all about how to take it! That was one of the factors. That's why I decided to inject it, cos I hadn't thought of that before."

• Another THT effort – a booklet entitled Your Feelings - purports to provide sound advice to enhance emotional wellbeing and is clearly targeted at HIVers. Yet instead of advising against using drugs like meth to self-medicate depressive feelings - as 20% of HIV+ men in London do at extreme risk to their already compromised immune systems – it merely states that using "too much can sometimes cause problems with our emotional wellbeing", and then likens meth to the "similar but milder" effects of energy drinks like Red Bull!

"The first casualty in any war is truth, closely followed by common sense..."

~ Hiram [American Senator]

3: THIS PC INSANITY

IMAGINE you are walking along a secluded beach and, unbeknownst to you, quicksand lurks ahead…

Continue on your path unwittingly and you will sink, but a prominently-positioned sign close to the quicksand's edge informs you of the potential consequences of your actions should you choose to ignore it. Now, would you expect its message to be clear and hardhitting to spell out the danger and risk of drowning? Or ambiguous, light in tone and enticing, implying that the experience might even be fun? Naturally, you would expect the sign to demonise the quicksand and graphically spell out its pitfalls. Whether or not the sign scares or offends others who choose to ignore its message and proceed regardless is irrelevant because it is vital that you are equipped with clearcut, undiluted information from which to make an informed choice whether or not to continue; information which, ultimately, may prevent you sinking and drowning…

In a humane and civilised society we expect to be warned of such dangers ahead of time. Indeed, were such warnings not in place the resultant casualties and fatalities would result in mass uproar, demands for public inquiries and for negligent heads to roll. So why the wall of silence that permits the know-it-all academics who infest AID$ Inc. to get away with not clearly signposting the similarly real, life-endangering threats faced by gay men today, while denigrating the efforts and achievements of those who do seek to raise the alarm?

"Huge amounts of resources have been invested globally by academics out to clear meth’s name, but most of those commentators are attached to the AIDS industry. If it 'fessed up to the severity of the issue it would have to do more to address it."

~ Urban [samesame.com]

In 2003, in an email richly disdainful of LIFE OR METH's “dubious†methods, the smug head of London's GMFA, Hodson, insisted that the “gay men's health charity†would not be singling out meth over recreational drugs like K and ecstasy and scoffed that I should go away and leave such work to “professionalsâ€, while Australia's ACON - which, in the words of one of its own boardmembers, presides over Sub-Saharan Africa levels of HIV; has resolutely denied any link between meth use and HIV transmission; has referred to gay men in internal memos as "the garbage level"; and whose sole response to its crystal crisis, aside from legitimising it with user-enabling guidelines (i.e. "Wrap in cigarette paper before swallowing"... "Keep a spare pipe available in case one becomes damaged or too hot"... etc.), has been to attack and smear community lobbyists who question its failures, labeling them "homophobic", "liars" and "self-professed addicts in recovery" - has described LIFE OR METH's efforts as “laughableâ€.

If LIFE OR METH's frank and honest approach is "laughable", then the PC methodology and ideology subscribed to by ACON, THT and GMFA et al to deny real and present threats to public health borders on the pathologically deranged.

In April 2003 I advised ACON staff at their gleaming Sydney HQ that unless they acted swiftly to signpost the very real dangers of meth to contain and curtail its spread within the local gay community, a severe price would be paid further down the line. They scorned my “unscientific†evidence and ignored the warning, and today Australia is in the grip of its biggest and deadliest drug epidemic, with up to 100,000 meth addicts. 75 fatalities were linked to meth in 2005 alone, along with an escalation in violent crime, mental health problems, hospital admissions and HIV transmissions. Latest figures show that 1.5m Australians have now tried meth - almost 10% of the population - and NSW is by far the most afflicted state with 20,000+ addicts; a catastrophe that ACON could have largely averted.

"Ice has become a menace in our society, tearing apart many Australian families and communities… Those who are addicted to ice lose all semblance of control and lapse into violent, uncontrolled, often homicidal rage...it is a frightening drug and we need a special emphasis."

~ Former Prime Minister [Announcing in 2007 a $130m fund to tackle hard drug use in Australia, part of which was allocated to ACON]

"I thought we should hit [meth] as hard and as quickly as possible, that there was no way of dressing up the drug... Trying to protect it or make it look like it is simply a matter of academia or clinical discussion would hide the very real personal impacts of the drug."

~ Pyne [Government minister on the 2007 crystal meth TV campaign]

"The graphic nature of [the TV campaign] is to show the dangers of continued use but also to scare people about trying it in the first place because we haven't got accurate figures about how addictive it is... We think it can be up to 40% addicted. In other words, 40% of people who take it get addicted to it, and that's horrendous."

~ Dr. Herron [Chairman of the Australian National Council on Drugs]

"I try not to be critical of agencies. I simply state the fact: we saw this great illegal express train coming down the line."

~ Ken Maroney [NSW Police Commissioner]

"[CAAMA - Community for Action Against Meth Amphetamine] have raised an excellent point about the need for explicit and hardhitting warnings about the dangers of meth use. This would be consistent with our policy."

~ The Green Party

"It will take a concerted community action to get government action. It is also likely that concerned citizens like CAAMA will have to work hard to ensure that community based-programmes are effective."

~ Clover [MP and Lord Mayor of Sydney]

ACON's failure to act in the face of conclusive evidence spurred Sydneysider Shayne Chester to co-found CAAMA in 2006, which documents the rise of meth in Australia and timelines ACON’s systematic refusal to intervene. "Those who can only understand addiction theoretically have actually contributed to this harm," says Chester. "It's why their work is known as harm maintenance in 12-step circles. To have insisted that meth was “just another drugâ€, and then used HIV dollars to print step- by-step instructions on how to use, was just criminally insane."

Although CAAMA has lobbied both state and federal politicians, leading to questions being raised in Australia's parliament, ACON have refused radio and television requests to appear alongside Chester to debate the meth epidemic, which he maintains can only be aleviated by hardhitting educational programs that, he says, "fulfill our rights to honest information. In the 12 months since mine and other voices evolved into a community lobby, the AIDS industry has finally been forced to shift its policy and has recently put its name to an NSW Health Department meth poster, and is finally conceding that meth is not just any party drug. Sadly, in the time that took, hundreds more people became addicted in Sydney as the debate degenerated into a schoolgirlish catfight."

In September 2007, ACON issued a "video commercial" entitled The Glam Reaper - a "high-camp, high-fun" drag pastiche - to "mark" the 20th anniversary of the Grim Reaper television ad, Australia's most effective HIV prevention campaign to date. "What is the message here?" asks Chester. "HIV/AIDS used to be grim but now it's glam? Come join the happy HIV picnic, everyone's doing it?" At the same time, in an apparent bid to repair its tattered image, ACON - which last year spent $20,000 on a minor cosmetic logo change at the same time that a food shelter for needy HIVers closed due to a $20,000 shortfall - renamed its workers "angels" and pleaded with potential cash donors on its website to "Help support our angels' work and make a difference to the lives of many people in our community".

A community in which, statistically, one in three HIVers go to bed hungry and the lives of countless MSM are being wrecked by ACON's drug and HIV misinformation strategies...

"Here's my donation," says Chester. "It's a mirror. ACON need to understand that community volunteers don't want medals or haloes, nor do they work for position, exploitation, acknowledgement, opportunity, status, self-interest or financial reward. It is a selfless, unconditional endeavour because some of us actually care about others in our tribe and have a vague notion that we are all here for each other. The Sydney GLBQT community would be well served if ACON's board learned that lesson from its volunteers. And probably better served if it just disappeared altogether."

Despite threats of physical violence, attempts to hack into and sabotage the CAAMA website and a campaign of intimidation, Chester continues to keep the flame of truth alive with significant success, having amassed a legion of support from socially aware community members.

"It's time to clear away the politically correct nonsense, to stop focusing on fripperies such as gay marriage and other diversions and start focusing on something that will really assist gay men and the wider community: an intense campaign aimed at HIV/AIDS prevention."

~ Heard [The Australian]

In New York City, the counterproductive PC harm reduction/user enabling approach implemented by the city's largest MSM sexual health agency, Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) - which waited until 2004 before issuing its first major report on the local community's chronic addiction to crystal – also prompted local residents to take an enlightened, hardline approach. Bruce Kellerhouse and Dan Carlson launched the HIV Forum in 2003 with long-time AIDS activist Staley, who self-funded several anti-meth bus shelter posters. They remain unconvinced that the multi-million dollar-funded GMHC is doing anywhere near enough to warn Manhattan's gay community about major health scares. "GMHC continue to do what they do best, which is to suck up all the community resources," Kellerhouse says. "They are lacking in visibility for HIV prevention for gay men."

Spencer founded the Medius Institute in 2005 to create research, programs and policies that support gay men in living healthier, happier lives and to promote policy progress on gay men's health in New York. took implicit aim at GMHC when he told Gay City News in February 2007: "A lot of the AIDS organisations only stop by our neighbourhoods when they've got their hands stretched out for a donation. It speaks volumes that the first anti-meth programs in Chelsea were created and funded by concerned individuals."

The upfront approach of committed groups like UFA, CAAMA and HIV Forum in effectively responding to the horror that is meth abuse clearly works, so why does it annoy AID$ Inc. so? And why the abrasive unresponsiveness and resistance towards informed outsiders?

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

~ Arthur Schopenhauer [Philosopher]

Such hostility has emerged out of a definite context. Organisations built on hierarchal structures by nature constrain and block the free flow of ideas and productivity. This is fine for commerce-based industries but potentially catastrophic for those involved in safe-guarding public health, because the interdepartmental politics, lack of openness and flexibility and the need to respond to market forces makes such creaking structures less able than smaller, contained groups of like-minded, intuitively-attuned individuals to provide the adaptability and high responsiveness required to deal with existing and emerging crises, such that HIV and crystal meth represent. Thus AID$ Inc.’s unhelpful perception that resources like LIFE OR METH represent a subversive threat to the status quo.

In other words, the clarity and urgency that defines our style, and our synchronistic ability to get essential, compassion-led responses and campaigns into the public eye quickly, efficiently and on miniscule budgets, exposes their failings and limitations all too clearly, laying bare their lumbering ineffectualness, ineptitude and inertia for all to see. In fact, the more I wised up to the dilatory, blinkered ways in which many of these larger agencies operate - in particular the rigid, closed mindsets and irrational PC belief systems that run counter to emphasising the need to protect their communities' health and wellbeing above all else - the more it became abundantly clear that, like the infamous emperor himself, AID$ Inc. is wearing no clothes.

Gay-run AIDS organisations that set out to raise awareness around sexual health in the 1980s did so with one clear vision in mind: a zero HIV transmission rate and, ultimately, eradication of the virus.

Groups like UFA and Stop AIDS were set up and continue to be run by passionately committed and motivated people, many of whom volunteer their time. They survive largely on community donations yet unswervingly strive towards their goals regardless, conscious of the fact that were they to succeed in their mission then they would disband and move on to new challenges. They operate on the basis that their task is potentially finite and so do all they can to educate their communities how best to protect and respect their health, and they do so with compassion, integrity, speed and efficiency. And if that involves using a few shock methods to effectively convey and ram their messages home in order to reach out to the vulnerable and those at most risk, then so be it.

Others that set out with compassionate objectives became distracted along the way. Seduced by the power and prestige acquired through running cash- rich public sector edifices, not least those fashionably lauded by A-list celebrities, they allowed self-promotion and fundraising to move to the core of their activities. Their mission corrupted and integrity eroded, AID$ Inc.'s funding net quickly widened to embrace outsiders with vested interests such as government health departments and Big Pharma, while more and more of their income was pumped into executive wages and perks at the expense of vital health initiatives and prevention campaigns. Morphing from compassionate responders into self-serving entities, the aims and goals of the new army of “AIDS careerists†- mostly comprising media-trained academics with little formal training in healthcare - became blurred and submerged beneath the weight of bureaucratised procedures that sought to expand, sustain and dominate at all costs... [see "Normalising" HIV]

4: BEHIND THE CURTAIN

[QUANGO (Quasi-NGO): A non-governmental organisation/semi-public advisory and administrative body that is financed and supported by the government and having most of its members appointed by the government]

AID$ Inc.'s frenetic fundraising activities - which have variously been described as "grasping" and "begging" - yield it by far the largest slice of the funding pie compared to smaller, tight-knit operations like Stop AIDS and UFA, who remain committed to their missions and focused on keeping their core message alive, devoid of self-interest, greed or external influence. Indeed, the need to do so can be so all-consuming that the time and energy devoted to raising funds often features some way down their list of priorities, hence their constant struggle just to survive.

The alternative? To prostitute themselves to the culture of dependency on taxpayers' cash that saw AID$ Inc. long ago wave goodbye to its independence and climb into bed with outside interests to become academical adjuncts of government (quangos), jumping and kow towing to its excessive dictates and demands that have long seen the aggressive, compassion-led campaigns that once stemmed the spread of HIV and correlated health risks superseded by the creeping "left-is-right/ black-is-white/2+2=5" pervasiveness of political correctness; a destructive form of mental programing that has been systematically used to legitimise and normalise the HIV virus, thereby eroding and decimating the collective health of men who have sex with men (MSM) throughout the West and sending HIV transmission rates soaring.

"GMHC has never conducted any serious psychosocial research to find out how to design HIV prevention campaigns properly. Right now no one at GMHC knows what an effective HIV prevention campaign for gay men looks like. One of the reasons is that the money it takes from the federal government comes with restrictions that make it impossible to use it effectively. So instead our tax money and our donations are spent on what is safe, visible, and likely to bring in more donations, rather than what is efficacious."

~ [Gay City News]

"Most [uS] HIV prevention campaigns targeted at meth users are ridiculously shallow. The government has actively participated in the deaths of gay men by prohibiting funding from being used to disseminate the graphic information needed to make informed decisions."

~ [The Village Voice]

"Charities have donors with pre-conceived notions of who must be kept sweet. Government research money is now heavily under political influence; it would be a brave academic hoping for future grants who used government funds to conclude the latest Downing-Street-trumpeted health service initiative was garbage."

~ The Cochrane Collaboration

"Britain is the birthplace of many renowned charities. In the past few years, many of these organisations have undergone a curious transformation. They have begun to receive much of their income from the State rather than from individual donors. And they've given up important aspects of their work and concentrated instead on publicity and propaganda... The public has, for the most part, not yet noticed these changes and continued to give generously to charity appeals. But awareness is growing and the charities should realise that, if they abandon their traditional role, they may also weaken the respect in which they are held, and face a long-term loss in contributions that will end by making them wholly dependent on the government."

~ The Mail on Sunday [Editorial, February 2007]

A pattern of compliance to external directives that ultimately adversely impact on gay men's health is blatantly evident in AID$ Inc. UK, shedding light on its inability and thinly-veiled reluctance to act in the best interests of those it professes to serve.

“Common Purpose: Although it has 80,000 trainees in 36 UK cities, 30,000 graduate members and enormous power, Common Purpose (CP) is largely unknown to the general public. It recruits and trains its leaders to work beyond authority, to abuse their posts and serve CP instead of their own departments, which they then undermine. Its members control the NHS, where it wastes £60bn, much of it going into private pockets, and controls most of Britain's 8,500 quangos which spend £167bn annually according to the Cabinet Office. Most of that is waste... CP is identifying leaders in all levels of our government to assume power when our nation is replaced by the European Union, in what they call “the post democratic era.†They are learning to rule without democracy"...

~ Gerrish [Common Purpose Exposed]

“Quangos have proved the perfect vehicle for transforming the social fabric of Britain into a politically correct nanny state while avoiding the need for a democratic mandate for change."

~ Leo McKinstry [The Daily Mail, June 20, 2007]

In Britain, the HIV sector’s bureaucratically-inflicted decline has taken root thanks to its accountability to shadowy management consultants/"commissioners" within the state-owned NHS. Like the gay men's health sector, the UK's once world-renowned public health service has seen its once high standards systematically eroded from within since New Labour acquired power in 1997, despite having had £269.2 billion of taxpayer pounds lavished on it. For example, while the quota of available beds has declined annually, the number of deaths from hospital-acquired infections is now over 50 times higher than in some European countries.

This publicly unaccountable, self-selecting body of consultants, which costs the NHS around £600 million annually and has the power to make major decisions that affect society, announced in December 2006 that the entire approach of agencies like THT and GMFA would be rethought due to their "failure" to impede record rates of HIV among MSM (for the third year running over 2,600 were diagnosed HIV+ in the UK in 2007 - the highest rate on record); a decision effectively imposed on an HIV sector that has allowed itself to become a government arm, responsive to its misguided and often damaging dictates and directives in order to secure additional funding. "We [have] little evidence as to the effectiveness of current HIV prevention programs," the commissioning body said when setting out its proposal to restructure the way AID$ Inc. UK tackles HIV prevention.

In November 2007, the London Gay Men's HIV Prevention Partnership (LGMHPP) - a central fund contributed to by London's NHS Trusts and administered by NHS commissioners - confirmed it would be slashing the budget for information resources such as booklets and advertising campaigns in gay media by 36% and axing a swath of sexual health counseling in favour of "Persuasive Interpersonal Interaction" (i.e. face-to-face interviews with gay men conducted by hundreds of volunteers converging on bars and clubs, probing and snooping into every area of their sex lives on the pretext of "disseminating safe sex advice based on each individual's needs.")

Dubbed "quality interaction" by the propagates of this intrusive new approach, every intimate detail gathered would then be stored on a cross-accessible central database, adding to the UK government's growing raft of sinister Big Brother measures that include 4.2 million CCTV cameras erected in towns and cities across Britain (one for every 14 citizens), a national biometric ID card, the proposed microchipping of prisoners, and a multitude of databases ranging from a DNA archive to one that stores school children's fingerprints.

“Gay people are often justifiably concerned that details about their sexuality are being collected by the state and could potentially be misused by public officials in the future, for reasons completely unrelated to crime prevention or prosecution. We need laws designed to make us safer, not laws that control and monitor every aspect of our lives, and which hand over more power to a Big Brother state.â€

~ Dominic Grieve [uK Shadow Home Secretary]

"Hardly a day goes by without a Minister calling for yet another vast database or yet more surveillance powers. What is wrong with Britain? Why are we sleepwalking our way into a surveillance society? This government's relentless urge to snoop, record and file every detail of our lives is putting our very democracy in danger."

~ Dr. Gus Hosein [The London School of Economics]

Essentially, the NHS commissioning body was proposing such measures to resolve the UK HIV sector's abject failure to stem the decline in the gay community's sexual health - a decline that AID$ Inc. UK allowed the NHS to conspire in and fuel by taking its cash in return for following its politically correct dictates and directives!

The UK HIV sector admitted as much when one of its own health workers told Gay Times: "Most of the gay agencies involved are furious, especially as the report dismisses most of the work they've been doing to NHS specifications for the past six years."

GMFA swiftly launched a desperate damage limitation offensive in the gay press, claiming that the HIV infection rate is at record levels only because more MSM are coming forward to be tested, and that rates have in fact remained steady over the years. "The uptake of HIV testing in recent years highlights the recent success of health promotion in reducing the number of gay men with undiagnosed HIV," said GMFA head Hodson - who also, incidentally, opposes a ban on bareback videos on the basis that “I don’t like the thought of censorship, particularly that which discriminates against gay men†- contradicting clearcut evidence that shows that HIV is on the increase due to more UK MSM than ever having unsafe sex, with up to 9000 estimated to be unaware that they carry the virus because they are not coming forward to be tested, particularly in the wake of prosecutions against those who recklessly or wilfully infect others.

Discrediting Hodson's fallacy that more gay men than ever are coming forward to be tested, 2007's Sigma Gay Men's Sex Survey reported that the proportion remains unchanged since 1997, while Will Nutland, The Terrence Higgins Trust's ubiquitous press spokesman (officially known as Head of Health Promotion), told the London listings magazine Out in December 2007: "HIV statistics gauged by ongoing surveys are in fact likely to be an underestimation, since around one in four gay men with HIV haven't had the infection diagnosed."

In December 2006, a Pink Paper reader wrote that GMFA can't not be aware of the true picture because its collection buckets were a World AIDS Day fixture at Central Station, one of a growing number of hardcore sex-on-premises venues in London where condoms are routinely shunned, barebacking is the encouraged norm and used needles and syringes are casually discarded. One such venue even had to remind all its members in an email that the act of deffacation, particularly in the manager's office, was against club rules.

"GMFA are not the sex police," parroted PC disciple Hodson, prompting a contributor to the Pink Paper's bulletin board to liken the charity's tact to that of a cancer charity begging for money in a hospital chemotherapy ward. GMFA's effective ruling body, The Terrence Higgins Trust, has since awarded a number of underground sex-on-premises venues that adopt a "code of good practice" its official 'Play Zone' seal of approval; an unenforceable code that will be policed just twice a year and risks driving those in search of unsanitised, unregulated sex even further underground to non-Play Zone venues while acting as a lure to young men who would not otherwise consider entering such environments. [see Dirty Little Secret]

"Those practicing unsafe sex need reminding that HIV is one of many STIs that HIV-seroconcordant couples may be discordant for...that can manifest more virulently in HIV+ gay men, accelerate HIV's progress, make HIV more infectious and play a role in such disorders as liver failure or cervical/rectal cancer. The take-home message simply has to be that super-infections may well occur and are occurring in sex clubs and backrooms throughout the UK today."

~ Philip Rochester [uK.Gay.Com discussion board]

"GMFA has the bare-faced cheek to collect money at sex-on-premises establishments where condoms are shunned, and then uses that money to fund 'Arse Classes', 'Bondage For Beginners' and 'How-To-Get-That-Stud-Out-of-His-Towel-And-Into-The-Sauna' courses on the basis that they are empowering gay men to get the sex they want. What twisted logic!"

~ Clifton [Disco Damaged]

"The messages [most cruise clubs] are sending out are that diseases like HIV and hep C are no big deal, and that gay men don't have any respect for themselves."

~ Spike [London club promoter]

Heavy petitioning in the gay press resulted in the HIV prevention budget being saved, but not without a notable casualty. In March 2008, it was announced that GMFA's contract to supply London's HIV prevention campaigns wouldn’t be renewed, thereby marginalising the charity and its activities and ending a succession of PC ads that have sought to sexualise, fetishise, romanticise, trivialise and, ultimately, legitimise the HIV virus. Instead, the London Sexual Health Commissioning Group, which apportions HIV prevention funding, awarded the three-year contract to THT, the UK's largest provider of HIV services.

Soon after, THT announced as part of the Pan London HIV Prevention Programme contracts the launch of the London Gay Men's Sexual Health Helpline phone service and face-to-face interviews "for gay men to discuss sexual health questions" - the same pretext by which the original scheme intended to converge on gay bars and clubs to obtain intimate details of gay men's sex lives – which will effectively enable THT's shadowy NHS commissioners to implement their snooper’s charter and start building their Orwellian gay men's sex database via the back door…

“We are delighted to confirm these contracts,†Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust Chief Executive Middleditch said when announcing the changes. “The services they provide are vital to continue the excellent work being done in London to prevent and treat HIV in the gay community and enable people with HIV to improve their overall health,†she continued, failing to explain why the HIV prevention budget was being awarded to a charity/quango that has excelled at managing while abysmally failing at containing and curtailing the virus. “It’s in everyone’s interest, not just the gay community, to see the number of HIV infections reduced. The services that will be provided over the next three years are built on best practice and evidence of cost effectiveness. We are improving the service we provide by becoming very outcome focussed.â€

"The concentration of all things HIV in the hands of one organisation cannot be a good thing. THT must decide if it wants to be the dominant provider of HIV services to those who carry the virus, or a preventer of the virus. It can't be allowed to have it both ways, particularly when there is evidence to show it's become incredibly rich commodifying and pandering to the virus, and in encouraging its spread by adhering to a PC agenda that has sought to play down it's serious consequences."

~ Rob [Disco Damaged]

"We are an independent charity, rooted in the communities we serve. We use our insight to innovate and inspire change in policies, services and minds."

~ Terrence Higgins Trust [THT's Mission Statement]

Indicating a deliberate campaign that is, for whatever reason, being waged by government bureaucrats to compromise and demoralise sexual health in the UK, in February 2008 a damning survey of UK medical professionals working in sexual health concluded that their work had not been prioritised in recent years, despite the total number of STI diagnoses at sexual health clinics rising 60% between 1996 and 2005. Almost 50% accused NHS primary care trusts of not examining sexual health needs in their area in over three years, and two-thirds of trusts were found to be diverting money intended for sexual health elsewhere.

5: “SOLD DOWN THE RIVERâ€

THE EXTENT of AID$ Inc. UK's duplicity in responding to government dictates - and the dire implications that are arising due to vital aspects of gay health policy being hijacked and dictated by faceless NHS bureaucrats and consultants - hit home on November 1, 2006.

That was the day the 26-year-old THT launched an aggressive campaign to promote the intervention antiretroviral cocktail PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis); a 28-day course of unproven, noxious AIDS drugs that may prevent HIV developing in the body if started within 72 hours after exposure. Ever since, THT has intensively blitzed major gay media, explicit hook-up sites and social venues with its PEP fire extinguisher ad, including Play Zone-endorsed sex clubs and saunas where PEP is being actively prescribed amid a backdrop of rampant unsafe sex and hard drug abuse, prompting speculation that PEP promotion is tied into funding THT receives from the pharmaceutical industry.

"I met an HIV+ on the net who shocked me when he said he had fucked a guy without protection, came inside him, disclosed afterwards, and then advised him how to get PEP."

~ [Positive Nation]

"We can saturate the gay press with information about PEP and there will still be men who need to know about it who don't," emoted Nutland in a THT press release with an urgency not afforded to warning the same target audience about safe sex, nor the significant risks of contracting HIV while high on crystal and other disinhibiting drugs, nor the devastation meth inflicts on the already compromised immune systems of HIVers, accelerating progression to full-blown AIDS and death. And at a time when:

• Record HIV transmission rates were being confirmed by government figures;

• 35% of under 21s were routinely engaging in unprotected sex with 40% unaware of their status, according to an 800-strong survey of gay teenagers;

• Manchester police confirmed the widespread infiltration of crystal meth into the UK's second largest gay scene;

• A well-known scene-goer was found dead in his London flat, choked on his vomit and surrounded by needles which he had used to inject meth, while a 25-year-old overdosed on GHB at a London gay club and subsequently died.

"The analogy [of PEP] with the morning after pill is very interesting. We [in the US] were promised that was going to solve the problem when it became available over the counter. But I predicted five years ago that in fact it would worsen the problem of sexually transmitted infection."

~ Dr. Trevor Stammers [sexual health expert]

The minority of MSM who genuinely - as opposed to recklessly or intentionally - slip-up and "need to know" about PEP is clearly out of all proportion to the majority who need to be:

• ly informed about the reality of what HIV is and how it is spread;

• Educated properly how to apply condoms so that they don't break in the first place;

• Made fully aware of the dangers of correlated sexual health risks like hard drug use.

Implementing such campaigns would negate the need to obsessively promote PEP in the first place, and at the expense of vital preventive campaigns and the exorbitant cost to the taxpayer via the NHS, which picks up the bill each time a course of PEP is prescribed, and not always for the principle reason it was intended (i.e. accidental exposure to HIV).

Of 30 men interviewed by Sigma Research who had used PEP, 50% said they'd sought it out following unprotected sex with someone they knew to be HIV+ or who disclosed their status following sex as opposed to a condom breaking.

Of 185 people prescribed PEP at St. 's hospital in London between June 2005 and June 2006, 80% were MSM, nearly half of whom had had unprotected passive anal sex, mostly in casual situations. 8% of the PEP prescribed was for MSM who had taken PEP before, indicating a sizeable subgroup who are repeatedly trying to ‘manage’ high-risk sex. A study of repeat prescribers at the Mortimer Market and St ‚Äôs STD clinics in London and Brighton, compared with 'one-offs', were found to be nearly four times as likely to have had further unsafe sex in the three months before requesting PEP and in the three months after and with twice as many partners, including known positive partners. None of the one-offs had sex with a known positive partner in the three months after PEP whereas 38% of repeat- prescribers did.

When asked why, in such a volatile climate, THT was targeting the consequences of unsafe sex instead of balancing its aggressive PEP strategy by also attacking the causes of HIV infection - and despite PEP's growing reputation as a “morning after pillâ€; its efficacy being questioned by leading AIDS doctors (how do you prove the reason for a negative outcome?); its uptake in the UK being disappointingly low for the pharmaceutical companies concerned, despite the promotional overkill; users experiencing many of the chronic side effects associated with AIDS drugs that force many to stop using after a few days; PEP's ability to cause the body to develop resistance to future use of antiretrovirals; and each course costing the cash-strapped NHS over £600; and amid major NHS cutbacks and the looming spectre of widescale cancer and HIV drug rationing - Nutland conceded:

"THT is undertaking this work because national HIV prevention strategies and guidance articulates that PEP provision should be one part of the UK's HIV prevention response. This has been articulated by the Chief Medical Officer."

Clarifying his response, Nutland provided a "smoking gun" memo from the UK's Chief Medical Officer, Liam son, dated April 6, 2006 and issued to "All Chief Executives of Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities in England", highlighting the extent to which THT has morphed into a thinly-veiled state-funded quango; effectively a government front with a remit to protect commercial interests (i.e. it is no longer a gay men's health charity driven by gay men for the benefit of gay men). In the memo, the Chief Medical Officer states:

"I would...ask you to ensure that PEP is part of the spectrum of sexual health services for your local populations."

As if to hammer the message home, in an identical pact of allegiance to its chief paymaster GMFA launched its own PEP "sand timer" campaign in December 2006, duplicating THT's PEP campaign ad in the same media and rotating in unison on internet hook-up sites.

The extent to which government interference has been allowed to interfere with and infect the direction of gay men's health in the UK via a conniving HIV sector - whose concentration of resources to aggressively promote a volatile, noxious pharmaceutical drug that few responsible MSM are ever inadvertently likely to need, while sending out a clear message to others that it can be used as a "quick fix" if taken a morning or two after engaging in reckless sex - is symptomatic of AID$ Inc. UK's blind arrogance and lack of accountability in confronting today's major health issues.

"Gay men's health requires a radical overhaul; from the government and pharmaceutical industry arm it’s become into an independent, self-funded entity run by gay men who won’t sell the rest of us down the river and allow our health to be compromised and jeopardised by outsiders with dubious interests and sinister agendas."

~ Clifton [Pink Paper]

AID$ Inc. UK has long been steeped in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, pushing its drugs as far back as 1992 when AIDS was a largely untreatable disease. Then, THT's newly-appointed Chief Executive Nick Partridge - already embroiled in accusations of defrauding the charity's pension fund scheme, making front page headlines in The Pink Paper and the mainstream press - was branded an "AZT pimp" for engaging in an underhand deal with Glaxo Wellcome whereby THT was financially-renumerated for recommending high dosages of the chemotherapy drug - developed in the 1960s but not approved due to its high toxicity - to unwitting UK AIDS patients while mindful of the fact that AZT hastened death for many; a revelation described at the time as "part and parcel of a program of genocide that is being conducted against gay men" amid claims that AZT's poisonous properties were themselves causing many of the symptoms associated with full-blown AIDS.

"GAG (Gays Against Genocide) were protesting because THT was producing a leaflet encouraging the use of AZT which was directly funded by Glaxo Wellcome, and we felt there was a real conflict of interest... THT was supposed to be supporting people with AIDS, but they were taking money to plug a drug which was toxic... It was killing people!"

~ s [Positive Nation]

"The oft repeated claim that AZT 'extends life' is based on research that fully deserves to be called fraudulent."

~ Lauritsen [Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story]

At its height, AZT - the most toxic drug ever licensed for human consumption in the free world - cost $8,000-$12,000 per patient each year, generating over $1 billion annually for Glaxo Wellcome. A bottle of AZT that cost around $5 to make could be sold for over $500 by prescription, with most of the mark-up being subsidised by the taxpayer.

Such scandals didn't prevent Partridge receiving an OBE from the UK government in 1999 for "services to AIDS" and maintaining his lucrative Chief Executive role, nor did they put a stop to THT receiving funding from Glaxo Wellcome (GSK), which continues to this day.

Why should gay men be any more trusting of GlaxoKline's motives when, in America, the pharmaceutical giant stands accused of failing to reveal studies showing possible links between its anti-depressant drugs and an increased rate of suicidal thoughts, and where investigations have uncovered GSK's involvement in anti-HIV drug trials carried out on children in care in the 1990s?

"As a major force in HIV care, GlaxoKline works closely with charitable organisations and healthcare professionals to help improve the outlook for communities in the UK and abroad. This year, as in previous years, GSK has committed further funds and resources towards this work.â€

~ GSK advert [uK Positive Nation magazine, 2007]

GMFA, meanwhile, shamelessly has its snout in the trough of the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical giant Pfizer International, another manufacturer of AIDS drugs whose concern is not so much for the and wellbeing of gay men as for the interests of its shareholders who demand an expanding market for its lucrative antiretrovirals and combination therapies...

In May 2007, concerns regarding the collusion between charities and Big Pharma were raised by the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the body that advises the NHS on which drugs to use. Of particular note, it said charities had to be wary of pharmaceutical company donations, and urged them to question the cost of drugs more. "Patient organisations need to think very carefully about why pharmaceutical companies are giving them money," said the institute's Chairman Sir Rawlins, "and they have to make sure they are not beholden to a pharmaceutical company. I have yet to hear a patient organisation criticise a price of the drug. When they do that, they’ll come into their own."

6: “NORMALSING†HIV

"I CAN SEE in the gay community, just from my own observations and from talking to people, that the issue of HIV and AIDS has kind of been a little shelved or has changed... It seems to me that after that wave of 'we can get drugs, we can get treatment', there's almost a sense of a lack of emergency again... I'm not saying this because I'm a prude. I'm just saying 'oh my God'... I went to quite a few gay events [in the US] and I was talking to my friends, who are a bit older, and they were saying they were really freaked out by what people were doing in their 20s; they're, like, virus chasing... I think that the danger is that the alarm bell is left silent."

~ Annie Lennox [The Pink Paper, 17 April, 2008]

Born of a response to the siren call to contain and curtail the spread of HIV, the real fight against AIDS ended in the mid-1990s. Since then AID$ Inc. has systematically immersed itself in managing and commodifying the virus while paying scant lip service to preventing the spread of HIV and keeping the safe sex message alive.

"Many organisations...chose to tone down or scale back their prevention outreach for gay men, just at a time when infection rates for gay and bisexual men - particularly young men - began to climb again after posting declines in the 1990s."

~ Bob [The Advocate]

By the early/mid-1990s, the compassion-led advocacy of many AIDS organisations in the West - not least the encouraging of safe, mutually-respecting behaviours combined with effective, hardhitting safe sex campaigning - had succeeded in substantially reducing HIV transmissions to the extent that their task was becoming minimalised. To survive and expand, many larger organisations abandoned their enshrined principles and objectives and “sold their souls†to outside interests, and a process of bureaucratisation – or “quangofication†- ensued that, ultimately, would see a devastating price paid by those whose health they were tasked to protect.

The start of today’s upward trajectory in HIV transmissions can be pinpointed precisely; to the emergence of combination therapies in 1995/6 when infection rates were at their lowest level since the start of the epidemic.

Some AIDS agencies publicly hailed HAART - highly active antiretroviral therapy - as a miracle panacea, providing the pretext for a seismic shift in their priorities and emphasis away from effective HIV prevention campaigning towards HIV management; one that would enforce a renewed dependency for a sector dispensing vital services and life-saving treatments while justifying their demands for ever greater injections of cash to support their reconstructed, market-driven frameworks. Today, The Terrence Higgins Trust in London receives millions of pounds annually to provide HIV services from primary care trusts, local health boards and other central government health bodies. The equation is simple: the more HIVers it provides for, the more central funding it receives.

The commodification of HIV saw extraordinary levels of obfuscation, manipulation, intimidation and control freakery creep into AID$ Inc.'s practices, and public relations experts - "spin doctors" - appointed as health experts to justify and deftly explain away the scaling back or abandonment of established, proven structures and procedures in favour of brutally efficient, market-responsive systems that would ultimately maximise the sector's new, HIV services-oriented framework, and in ways which raised few eyebrows and prompted no questions from a compliant, ad revenue-hungry gay media.

The politically correct strategy of reducing HIV stigma via the avoidance of offending and/or upsetting the feelings of HIVers was the pretext by which AID$ Inc. justified diluting the impact of established and proven graphic HIV prevention campaigns.

"95% of HIV+ people would not care if an advert implied it's dumb to fuck without a condom, or that saggy arses and diarrhoea stink and will ruin your lovely gay image - whatever it takes to deter someone going through what they went through!"

~ Ricky Dyer [HIV+ journalist]

Such campaigns were watered down and their impact diminished in ways which many interpreted as a green light to dispense with precautions altogether and continue to do to this day, while the line dividing HIV- and HIV+ blurred as safe sex campaigns stopped attacking the virus and instead adopted a universal "play safe/use condoms" approach aimed at all MSM simultaneously rather than being targetted specific to HIV-status. These gave rise to oblique, confusing "one-size-fits-all" messages that prevail to this day. Devoid of the immediacy, consistency, accessibility and effectiveness of the aggressive, to-the-point campaigns they superceded, they have spectacularly failed to address the educational needs of the (still) negative majority, as soaring HIV rates testify.

"Our community used to be at war with HIV, back when graphic campaigns worked, but truth is often the first casualty in war. Subsequent campaigns progressively failed to hit the message home why HIV must continue to be avoided at all costs. Instead they sexualised, romanticised, fetishised and ultimately normalised the virus to the extent where "bug chasing", bareback films and high-risk sex venues are tolerated and even endorsed. When will the dangerous PC rationalising and commodification of HIV cease and the compassionate task of preventing this disease spreading even further begin?"

- Ben [Pink Paper letters]

"20 years ago the unequivocal message was 'AIDS means death - don't put yourself at risk'. How that message has changed since then. One recent [uK] sexual health campaign encouraged us to pull out 'like a porn star' rather than cum inside. There was no 'don't do bareback' message at all."

~ Heeley [The Pink Paper]

"It's not rocket science to see that current efforts to prevent the spread of HIV are failing. The time is now ripe for a return to the kind of hardhitting grassroots education campaigns that worked so effectively in the 1980s. This is an unfashionable idea, but what is the alternative? The status quo is simply not working."

~ Steinberg [boyz]

Indeed, so zealous has AID$ Inc. been at legitimising HIV that “reverse stigmatisation†has become common place, resulting in a blase social toleration of bareback videos, the high-profile endorsement of high-risk sex-on-premises venues where Class A drug use is rife, and the rise of the term ‚Äúbug chasing‚Äù, whereby some HIV- men - particularly those marginalised in AIDS-ravaged gay ghettoes - deliberately acquire the virus in order to conform to what they perceive as being the social norm.

"AIDS prevention messages had not weighed the needs and experiences of HIV- men specifically, choosing instead to broadcast a generic "play safe" theme tailored to avoid offending men who were HIV+. Other language in the AIDS liturgy seemed to dangerously minimise the impact of HIV, and failed to state plainly that being HIV- is better than being HIV+."

~ Duncan Osborne [Author, Suicide Tuesday]

In ensuring their long-term survival by exerting their dominance and responding to the effects of HIV and providing service to HIVers, AID$ Inc. globally devoted less and less energy and resources to addressing the causes.

Consequently, the irrational PC belief systems by which they operate have spawned a generation of uninformed, docile and consequently HIV-infected MSM dependent on its services and Big Pharma's life-prolonging - albeit toxic and potentially fatal - combination therapies. In conjunction with other factors, these medications can cause cancer, lung, liver and heart disease, heart attacks and, contrary to the deceptively optimistic outlook fanfared by AID$ Inc. - not least their rebranding of HIV/AIDS as a "manageable" disease - may keep the average 21-year-old newly-diagnosed with HIV alive for just 24.2 years. It is a sobering fact that around 200 gay men still die from AIDS complications in the UK each year. In 2006, 2,076 New Yorkers died from the disease, and AIDS remains the third leading cause of death in men under 65, exceeded only by heart disease and cancer.

“You may have heard somewhere that HIV is now a ‘chronic’ condition. I think what our HIV doctors mean is that it’s manageable: in a similar way to asthma or diabetes. So there you go, HIV is now ‘manageable’: just like long hair after using a good conditioner.â€

~ Gordon Mundie [THT Outreach Worker]

"GMFA tells gay men 'If you start HIV treatment early enough you can live to be 100', which is a downright negligent and inaccurate representation. Nothing about the nausea or diarrhoea, body-changing deformaties, liver and kidney damage, the draining lethargy or a life on low state handouts because of the inability to keep a good job through HIV drug failures and side-effects or their overall highly toxic nature."

Jimmy Y [uK.Gay.Com discussion boards]

"We have the facts and yet we are still missing the message. Don't buy into the myth that HIV is like diabetes. There is nothing manageable when dealing with an uncertain future, side effects from medication and, to top it all off, rejection based purely on your positive status. An HIV diagnosis can rip through your core and make you question everything."

~ Clint Walters [Founder of Health Initiatives]

"[HIV] is manageable, but to relegate it as another chronic condition makes many gay men feel that it is less of a threat... The main questions concerning HIV are: how would you view having another chronic disease, and would you want to be diabetic if you had the choice? Certainly no one should want to be infected, especially when it can be prevented."

~ Spinelli, MD [The Advocate Guide to Gay Men's Health and Wellness, Ayson Books]

"It is true that the treatment has improved, but anyone who thinks that having the virus is nothing more than an inconvenience is a complete idiot. Taking all the pills is unpleasant, but aside from that everything stops working as it should. I have constant diarrhoea one week followed by constipation the next, I’ve lost four stone in weight and can’t sleep."

~ Anon [Pink News]

By reconstructing HIV in this way - in the process legitimising and even glamorising the HIV virus that can still lead to full-blown AIDS, and which is still killing 200 men each year in the UK alone - the declining effectiveness of safe sex campaigning became inversely proportional to the burgeoning demand for AID$ Inc.'s portfolio of HIV services, which, perversely and macabrely, require a steady flow of MSM to be seroconverting in order to be lucrative and cost-effective. In London, where the AIDS sector has presided over a rapid decline in the overall sexual health of MSM since 1996, HIV infection rates continue to spiral alongside:

• Glossy, dumbed-down HIV brochures packaged and presented in ways which, to the uninformed and uninitiated, can appear to glorify the virus and equate acquisition with gaining entry into an exclusive members' club;

• Have-the-sex-you-want" courses ranging from "Bondage for Beginners" to "Sauna Cruising Tips" and "Arse Classes" advertised in scene listings magazines aimed at under 25-year-old club kids, 75% of whom no longer consider HIV to be a major health risk according to a recent survey;

• Saturation advertising campaigns for PEP that lull some into a false sense of invincibility with their reputation as an (unproven) “quick fixâ€/morning after pill, particularly among crystal meth users.

"Younger gay males think if they get [HIV] it won't be so bad, and they're just plain wrong. The pills are horrifying and can cause heart attacks, liver failure and a host of other problems, but how would they know? In the gay community the face of AIDS is healthy, active, geared to go...hell, damned sexy in some cases!"

~ Here Magazine

Several years ago, Spectator journalist Leo McKinstry infiltrated a GMFA sex course and exposed the group for squandering funds intended for HIV prevention. This resulted in The Charity Commission censuring GMFA, which narrowly escape closure. The validity of such courses to empower MSM to "get the sex you want" wasn't in question. That they were being run by a charity funded to address major issues around sexual health and HIV was. Today, GMFA gets around such technicalities by calling itself, somewhat questionably, "The Gay Men's Health Charity"; a tacit admission that it is no longer in the business of "Fighting AIDS".

"The HIV community is very attractive. We have a glossy magazine full of gentle messages of love, care and support for our condition with lovely pictures of attractive people in drug company ads holding hands with a 'spirit of love' or 'we understand' message. The THT logo of two hearts entwined tells gay men to come be part of the 'love in' that is HIV/AIDS."

~ Anon [uK.Gay.Com message board]

Such approaches demonstrably foster a climate that subliminally encourages the naive, gullible and weak-willed to "bug chase", while instilling in a significant core minority of HIVers the right to have unsafe sex with partners they know to be negative (i.e. "gift givers"/"breeders").

A climate in which:

• HIV treatments - not prevention - are routinely hailed as the solution [see "HIV is no Picnic"];

• Gaydar features an option for safer sex on its members' profiles as something that "needs discussion" as opposed to a non-negotiable plank;

• Three twinks catch HIV on the set of one bareback film; an industry that is catering to a growing demand fuelled by an HIV sector that refuses to stigmatise or speak out against so-called forms of "entertainment";

• Sex clubs that follow "codes of good conduct" are endorsed by leading HIV charities, serving to legitimise unsafe, sometimes extreme sexual behaviours which continue in such venues regardless;

• Scarce HIV resources are channelled into a web site that provides titilating, step-by-step instructions on dangerous, degrading and disempowering sex acts ranging from barebacking and scat to felching and asphyxiation;

• HIV prevention ads advise you to “Pull out like porn stars!†before you cum where once condoms were advocated at all times and without question; to “Get it on†and other suggestive messages with implied double-meanings that seemingly take their cue from an NLP handbook; or, if you already have an STI, to “Get it checked. Get back out there!†instead of pausing to consider how your sexual behaviour might need to be addressed to prevent you picking up an STI in future (the latter relaunched by THT in mid-2008, around the time its latest chargeable services - STI testing kits by post and face-to-face counselling - were being marketed in the gay press...

"HIV+ gay men now demand the right to have unprotected sex with anyone of their choosing without disclosure of their own status to their partners. In this these men are supported by major UK AIDS and gay men’s health charities, who maintain that it is not the responsibility of an HIV+ man to take control of safer sexual practices, thereby ensuring future service users for their own charities. After all, where would these agencies be if HIV was stopped in its tracks by all HIV+ gay men insisting on safer sex each time?"

~ Jasper Reynard [Chairman, GMAF]

That the HIV “charity†sector more actively supports the rights of HIVers than those of negative men is borne out by their insistence that it is not the responsibility of positive men to disclose their status if engaging in unprotected sex. Not surprisingly, AID$ Inc. has also proven to be the most outspoken critic of the recent spate of criminal convictions of HIVers who wittingly or carelessly pass the virus on to others, even dispensing tips to those wanting to avoid prosecution such as "Don't keep a diary listing your sexual exploits".

According to the last UK Gay Men's Sex Survey, 31% of the respondents whose last HIV test was negative had unprotected anal sex with someone whose HIV status they did not know, and 3.5% of negative MSM had unsafe sex with someone whose status they knew to be HIV+, while 42% of positive respondents had unprotected anal sex with someone whose HIV status they did not know, and 21% had unprotected sex with someone who had told them that their last test was negative. Furthermore, a 2008 study by the UK Medical Research Council, which questioned 3,500 gay men, reported that a third of respondents who knew they are HIV-positive are still having unsafe sex, and were statistically more likely to have unprotected sex than those who did not know their status.

"These are truly horrific figures, but it is the PCGM (political correctness gone mad) AIDS lobby who insist that [HIVers] are innocent parties and relentlessly defend them, and who maintain that it is negative men who should be taking the lead where safe sex is concerned. Yet who is it holding the gun?"

~ Seb C [uK.Gay.Com boards]

“People can shout as loudly as they like that they only bareback with other HIV+ guys but the figures, and my experience, tell another story. As a community we need to ditch the barebacking debate and speak with one voice on prevention to tackle these alarming figures. It is time to drop the softly-softly approach and get tough... Today, there is a new generation of young gay men playing HIV Russian roulette.â€

~ Philip Rochester [uk.Gay.Com discussion board]

"Public health officials and AIDS advocates say many gay men have adopted a laissez-faire attitude about safer sex, and they cite as examples the continued popularity of crystal meth, a rise in barebacking, and widespread apathy in which HIV is seen more as a nuisance than a life-threatening disease."

~ s [HIV Plus]

"'I challenge you to go into a UK gay bar, pick up any HIV prevention leaflet, and find a clear statement why you shouldn't catch HIV,' says Yusef Azad, senior policy officer with the National Aids Trust. And Azad is not the only one who thinks we've got it wrong."

~ Gus Cairns [Positive Nation]

"Placing small booklets in selected venues does not amount to a proactive public awareness campaign."

~ Shayne Chester [CAAMA]

When, in 1999, UK AIDS charities were told that American MSM were responding to the complacency of their AIDS agencies' wishy washy safe sex messages and returning, en masse, to unsafe sex practices in the wake of the popped corks and premature sighs of relief that greeted combination therapies, and that hardhitting campaigns were again needed to reinforce the message to UK MSM that AIDS remained a chronic and incurable killer disease, they dismissed the warning out of hand. It clearly did not make good economic sense for them to do otherwise: today, calls by distressed, newly-seroconverted MSM to most gay organisations and helplines in the UK are automatically referred to The Terrence Higgins Trust.

In the tax year 2005/6, The Terrence Higgins Trust announced in its annual Trustees Report a cash haul of £12,842,000. In 2006/7, a year that saw a further record rise in HIV transmissions, this had risen to a staggering £13,452,000...

"What figures are [THT] giving the government to secure future funding? Lets say they are predicting a further 6000 gay men next year, what is the rate of increase for the year after? That's how it works. The number of gay men becoming HIV+ is their business plan."

~ [uK.Gay.Com discussion board]

7: THE MERCHANTS OF HIV

IN A SHAMELESS bid to become the Wal*Mart/Tesco of UK HIV service providers, THT now provides to over 50,000 HIVers of all sexualities a year.

It has achieved this "feat" by creating a virtual monopoly, swallowing up more than 20 smaller HIV charities across the UK since 1999 like ruthless private equity asset-strippers, "streamlining" each acquisition with extreme costcutting procedures that trim vital services to the bone or simply axes them altogether. A monopolistic precedent that THT’s seemingly immortal chief suit, Nick Partridge, nevertheless regards as "an exciting opportunity to make a real impact for the UK as a whole". An exciting opportunity for who, exactly, as THT predatorily hovers over the longest-established and respected AIDS charity, Crusaid?

"How did [THT] consult with service users, the very people for whose benefit we exist? Were the views of the stakeholders and funders taken into account? THT...plans for a pale shadow of existing structures."

~ Roy Kilpatrick [Chair of HIV Scotland on THT's latest merger]

"There are so many people in need and so little in the way of services all over the UK. I've been horrified by all this, and am getting sick and tired of what I believe is jobs for the boys and dishonesty within the HIV sector. Where is the money going? I know I'm going to piss some people off, but Positive Nation is going to start exposing organisations who are taking advantage of HIV people and those who do not do what they are being paid to do with our taxes and charitable donations."

~ Ian [Publisher, Positive Nation]

THT has also drastically cut back vital counseling services to HIVers citing lack of funds. In May 2006 - the month it moved into lavish new multi-million pound premises in central London - the charity quietly announced the closure of its Specialist Advice Centre, which provided vital, high-level legal casework for dozens of HIV+ individuals, absurdly citing "budgetary restraints" and "increasing financial pressures". The centre’s team of solicitors, who often gave their time voluntarily and free of charge, stood up for the rights of HIVers who might otherwise have been unable to access legal representation over many years, winning numerous cases for those undergoing problems like immigration, housing, welfare benefits and social care.

"If the trend for mainstreaming our HIV services continues, I imagine we'll find ourselves in care settings which have all manner of impressive sounding equality policies displayed on the wall but fail to deliver in concrete ways that actually allow us the freedom to be who we are without fear of reprisal."

~ Fleet [Positive Nation]

By June 2006, there were 36,920 gay and bisexual men living with HIV in the UK. THT's service user targets are obligingly made up by vast numbers of African immigrants and asylum seekers who make up nearly all of the UK's heterosexual HIV+ population, who are referred to the charity by the NHS and often prioritised.

"Half of the UK AIDS spend is on African asylum seekers and refugees... UK AIDS agencies...know that the cash cow in the AIDS industry is African and not indigenous gay men. It is high time we had a robust public debate about how our AIDS funds are spent and distributed, before indigenous HIV+ gay men lose even the few crumbs they currently are able to have."

~ [Pink Paper]

To cap it all, in March 2008 THT was appointed sole contractor to provide HIV prevention campaigning to gay Londoners. Announcing the move, Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust Chief Executive, Middleditch, said: "We are delighted to confirm these contracts. The services they provide are vital to continue the excellent work being done in London to prevent and treat HIV in the gay community..."

"The concentration of all things HIV in the hands of one organisation cannot be a good thing. The THT must decide whether it wants to be the dominant provider of HIV services to those who carry the virus, or a preventer of the virus. It can't be allowed to have it both ways, particularly when there is strong evidence to show that the THT has become incredibly rich by doing its utmost to commodify and pander to HIV over the years, encouraging its spread by adhering to a politically correct agenda that has sought to play down it's serious consequences, opting to legitimise the disease rather than stigmatise it."

~ Rob [Disco Damaged]

THT's morphing from a gay men's HIV prevention charity into a bureacratised, market-driven HIV services provider, its complacency around HIV prevention and failure to educate effectively about correlated and causative health risks, such that crystal meth represents, is at complete odds with its prime objective clearly spelled out in its Mission Statement:

"To reduce the spread of HIV and STIs and promote good sexual health."

Since this article was posted, that wording has been mysteriously changed to read "To encourage people to value their sexual health, thereby minimising the spread of HIV and sexually transmitted infections, and reducing unintended pregnancies," effectively altering THT's mandate from preventers of the spread of HIV to mere encouragers of risk minimisation while implicitly emphasising that while it was set up as a gay men’s charity it now serves all HIVers irrespectively, thereby boosting further demand for its government-funded services. In this context, it is easy to surmise how AID$ Inc. have created a problem - their failure to prevent soaring rates of HIV infection - in order to facilitate a self-serving solution while also significantly boosting the profits of Big Pharma.

"The AIDS charities nowadays seem more concerned with marketing their own services for HIV+ men and there aren't any campaigns dealing with the rise in barebacking, safer sex promotion or meth use to protect negative men."

~ [Manchester scene-goer]

"No Condoms. No sex. Period. This simple mantra will stop HIV in its tracks, despite the best attempts of certain HIV and gay men’s health advisors to overcomplicate this for their own ends or oppose this in order to ensure future service-users."

~ Cass Mann [Positively Healthy]

The AIDS drug industry is now worth $7.1 billion a year, and is set to grow by at least 5% a year for the next 10 years to be worth $10.6bn by 2015. Industry market researcher Datamonitor says those "best poised to reap dividends" will have invested in researching and developing drugs with new modes of action...

"While the [pharmaceutical] advertisements promise 'health', the very market place of this investment industry is the existence and expansion of diseases. Prevention, root cause treatment and eradication of diseases threaten the pharmaceutical 'investment business with disease' and are therefore fought... The very industry that claims the monopoly on global health care is itself the biggest obstacle for the people of the world to enjoy a healthy life.... Accordingly, 80% of the pharmaceutical drugs currently on the market have no proven efficacy but merely cover symptoms. [Therefore] today’s most common diseases - including cardiovascular disease, cancer [and] AIDS - are not contained but continue to spread, despite the fact that effective, non-patentable alternatives [i.e. from nature] are available."

~ Dr. Matthias Rath, M.D.

Figures from the Centre for Responsive Politics, Campaign Finance Institute and Centre for Public Integrity reveal that $158 million was spent by drug companies to lobby the US federal government alone in 2004, $17 million was given in campaign donations (67% to Republicans), and $7.3 million was spent on political party conventions (64% going to the Republicans). $1m was given to the presidential campagn of Bush and $1.5m to Kerry. Big Parma has around 1,300 lobbyists in Washington - more than two for every member of Congress...

"You can hardly swing a cat in that town without hitting a pharmaceutical lobbyist."

~ Chuck Grassley [senate Finance Committee Chairman]

It is a grim, if sobering, fact that Big Pharma makes infinitely more money drugging the infected and treating the symptoms of certain diseases than it ever would curing said diseases. It is an equally sobering fact that, 25+ years into an epidemic that should long before now have been contained and curtailed, three times as many UK MSM are seroconverting than in 1996 - the year HIV medications started being prescribed. Yet this appalling tally is the same worldwide wherever bureaucratised (i.e. corruptible) HIV agencies have allowed themselves to become mere public relations conduits that place the interests of outside bodies like Big Pharma and central government above those of the communities they profess to serve.

"The main beneficiaries of this quarter century-long AIDS catastrophe have been pharmaceutical companies which, despite the odd gesture, continue to manoeuvre to protect patents and profits at the expense of the poor."

~ Gill [body Count: How they turned AIDS into a Catastrophe]

Big Pharma reaps enormous dividends from AID$ Inc.'s zealous emphasis on, and promotion of, the drugs on which HIVers become dependent for life - costing $618,900 per newly-diagnosed 21-year-old HIV patient over an estimated average 24.2 year lifetime on meds - and its targeting the effects of unsafe sex with unproven pharmaceutical drugs like PEP while paying lip service to educating effectively about the causes; a collusion that drains the public purse and comes at a huge price to society.

"The idea that HIV bureaucrats and modern medicine promoters are living in a different reality is not far from the truth. In my view, HIV sector decision makers have no connection with reality. They're simply operating on a system of false beliefs and circular reasoning that justifies their efforts to protect Big Pharma profits by exploiting, misleading and directly harming the public."

~ Clifton [uK.Gay.Com boards]

"The medications available are hailed as the answer to everyone's prayers where HIV is concerned, until you realise that their funding comes from cash-starved NHS trusts [in the UK], desperate to balance the books somehow while, in London, faceless suits are deciding which drugs can be used to treat HIV based solely on the cost of the treatment."

~ Plus-v-e Magazine

"Most [HIVers in the UK] are experiencing increased levels of deprivation... There's a loss to the economy of this group's productivity. There's an anecdotal figure for the cost of providing treatment to the NHS, which I've been advised not to reproduce here. Suffice to say, it's huge. Reducing the number of people living with HIV in the long-term will reduce the bill of HIV treatment, lost man-hours to the economy and reduce social welfare benefits being claimed by this group. This isn't rocket science."

~ Robin Brady [Chief Executive, Crusaid]

"The drug companies, the AIDS scientists, the World Health Organisation...all have gained [from HIV] except for HIV/AIDS patients and their loved ones, and the taxpayer. Some drug companies have become very rich with happy stock-holders. AIDS is a billion dollar business, and the big AIDS research money [in the US] is handed out exclusively by the Pentagon; another reason to suspect a tie of AIDS to military biological warfare research."

~ Alan Cantwell, MD [Aries Rising Press]

Therein lies the rub: because there's no financial incentive or sustainability in stemming the spread of HIV, the virus itself has become the market-driven HIV sector's lifeblood, with HIV- men these days eyed more as potential, lucrative service users; human fodder instead of human beings in need of effective, plain-speaking HIV prevention campaigns and initiatives around correlated and causative health risks.

"AIDS activist Cottrell asked an extremely pertinent question of the Chairman of UK Coalition concerning pharmaceutical company advertising in its publication Positive Nation: why did these companies not equally advertise and promote condom usage in the aggressive way they market their antiretrovirals?"

~ Cass Mann [Positively Healthy]

"My hope was one of the AIDS organisations would take the issue up and ask drug companies to assist us in stopping the spread of HIV. Instead they are hell bent on securing for the drug companies ever increasing profits. So certain is the trend in HIV infection in gay men with [AID$ Inc.] exercising absolute power over the AIDS and gay communities and gay press, one could easily write to the Financial Times and recommend pharmaceuticals as a sure fire share tip."

~ Cottrell [uK.Gay.Com discussion board]

And just as there's no long-term profit or sustainability in curing society's ills as it dispenses its life-prolonging treatments in the West - propelled by dishonest advertisements that portray users of HIV antiretrovirals as impossibly blemish-free superbeings - while steadfastly resisting calls for cheaper, generic versions to be made available to impoverished, under-developed nations (scandals that AID$ Inc.’s silence is complicit in aiding), HIV has become a golden egg for Big Pharma on a par with the diabetes and cancer industries.

AIDS antiretrovirals are to Big Pharma what chemotherapy is to cancer; highly toxic treatments which sustain the patient in his/her condition while reaping enormous profits for their makers, who continue to trasparently lament “no cure in sightâ€.

"I have long thought that the medical establishment... feels it is best served by keeping people sick rather than healing them. Look at diabetes, as a cynic. What a wonderful disease! A diabetic will live a fully normal life, just spending thousands of dollars a year in doctor's visits and medications, eventually succumbing to the disease, but not until spending tens of thousands of dollars to combat the symptoms."

~ Steve Runyan [Kombucha answers]

"In an ideal world, health and research should be the responsibility of the states and not a private task of profit-oriented pharmaceutical industries... Many times I have seen a CEO or President of a pharma decide not to investigate a promising medication due to the long-term lack of investment it may offer... We must be thankful to those pharmaceutical companies who understand that HIV patents are not pill-boxes, but human beings who deserve a normal life."

~ Filippo von Schloesser [HIV/AIDS specialist]

8: STEEPED IN COLLUSION

BUREACRATISATION, political correctness and collusion are devices of the greedy, cowardly, unconscionable and morally bankrupt, and, where healthcare is concerned, always yield the same devastating, dehumanising results.

In the UK, they have served to transform the National Health Service (NHS) from a compassionate provider into a dispassionate, unwieldy beast, wherein most of the hundreds of billions of pounds poured into it in recent years have disappeared into a black hole or been squandered on, and by, penny-pinching, target-obsessed bureaucrats and consultants - the hidden hands behind AID$ Inc. UK [see Behind the Curtain] - with a corresponding deterioration in services and standards of hygiene comparable to that of Third World hospitals.

The same bureaucratic malaise has infected "quangoised" AIDS organisations globally who, for the last decade, have sung from identical PC hymn sheets. From the UK to Australia and New Zealand to America and Canada, AID$ Inc.’s loyal choir boys have been:

• Running the same ineffective campaigns;

• Entwined with Big Pharma and its vested interests;

• Repeating the same evasive tactics and obfuscating jargon;

• Spinning the same everything-in-the-garden's-rosy falsehoods;

• Misrepresenting the same dubious statistics to cover-up their failures;

• Jumping through the same government hoops to secure taxpayers' cash;

• ng as liars those who dare speak out against their agenda of disempowerment...

All the while adopting the swaggering arrogance of a public monopoly combined with corporate greed; essentially a "mafia" of interconnected self-interests that waves an arrogant, two-fingered salute at those they are mandated to serve.

Agencies that once boasted of their independence cosy up to their government and corporate funders, close ranks and collude to protect their mutual interests, strengthen their dominance, bolster their standing in the public eye and support each others' identical PC agendas and policies while neglecting their obligation to serve their respective communities' best interests and educate effectively on sexual health. Certainly, they give the impression of acting independently of the other, but at the end of the day they are each served by the same, PC-brainwashed system servers, with all information processed through the same PC filters to ensure that they tow the official, one-party PC line.

London's GMFA was established in the early 1990s by a group of gay men appalled by THT's distasteful excesses, which were being widely reported by the gay and mainstream press at the time. Subsequently, as GMFA allowed its own infrastructure to become tainted amid claims of mismanagement and poor judgment, it climbed into bed with THT and, in recent years, has become a mere lap dog kowtowing to the dominant might of its former rival, the two agencies now speaking with one, politically correct voice on crucial sexual health matters.

"It is time we as a community woke up to what is so clearly happening in front of our very eyes and demand change. Perhaps the likes of THT and GMFA have become too incestuous and full of cronyism to even realise the extent of how their inbreeding is adversely impacing on the health of those they are mandated to serve."

~ Seb C [uK.Gay.Com boards]

THT and GMFA's 'love-in' was unashamedly serenaded in 2006, in the London club listings magazine QX, when THT spin doctor Will Nutland and GMFA mouthpiece Hodson rubber-stamped their mutual approval of the growing number of underground sex-on-premises venues in London that specifically cater for anonymous, and invariably unprotected, sexual encounters in adjacent articles that served to validate the others' stand, with no space provided for the opposing viewpoint.

"[Nutland] describes such venues as being 'a social health benefit', as if they were outreach facilities for hospital clinics, even though those engaging in unsafe sex can easily infect themselves with STIs and other strains of HIV - something all NHS clinics would find absolutely unsupportable - [while] Hodson chillingly states: 'I support a smoker's right to continue smoking, even knowing that it is likely to kill him', as if to say: 'I support an HIV+ gay man's right to continue having unsafe sex, even knowing that is likely to kill him.'... It is [their] fundamental responsibility to maximise the health and wellbeing of HIV+ gay men, and not to sanction behaviours which can overload their immune systems with pathogens they can easily avoid."

~ Cass Mann [Positively Healthy]

"Over the past five years, the gay community has been keeping a secret: unprotected sex is becoming normal again. In the dark room of any gay club, in those pre-sex conversations, one question - 'do you bareback?' - has become casual, ordinary, every day. Defenders of 'raw' sex see condoms as sissy, and brag that playing Russian roulette with their genitals is 'manly'."

~ Johann Hari [The Independent]

Going even further than defending the right of HIVers to transmit drug-resistant strains of the virus and STDs to one another in sex-on-premises venues while staunchly defending their right not to disclose their status to negative partners - maintaining that it is the responsibility of the negative partner to protect himself - in February 2008 the same organisations legitimised such venues that adopted their "code of good practise", Play Zone, on the pretext of providing "a safer, clean environment for customers and staff" along with safer sex information and PEP prescriptions, but yet again proving more active in their underlying support for the rights of HIVers - who comprise the core of visitors to such venues - than the chronic need to address the safety and welfare of negative men.

Justifying the move, the usual PC rhetoric was wheeled out by Will Nutland's sidekick spin drone, Rod . Namely, that if such establishments didn’t exist, the same activity would be driven “underground†and those in need of such information would therefore be out of reach. In the same breath, and as if on cue, then insisted that THT is not the "sex policeâ€, yet failed to explain exactly how the arrangement could work effectively without being properly enforced by the sponsoring HIV charities, who will only be running compliance checks at the venues in question twice a year, nor how they will reach the gay men driven even further underground to unsanitised, Play Zone-free venues in search of unregulated sex.

THT's Sydney counterpart, ACON, launched a similar exercise several years ago. Amid a “Sub-Saharan†epidemic of HIV gripping Sydney’s gay community, community newspaper SX ran an article in 2006 that dared to question the prominent display of ACON's code of practice logo at HQ - a notorious casual sex club on the main Oxford Street strip that continued to host a dark orgy room but no condoms, and blatantly listed personal barebacking ads on its notice board. ACON retorted that the venue did not breach its code for safe sex premises, and HQ promptly switched its advertising to rival paper The Sydney Star Observer (SSO) which, unlike SX, grovels and kowtows to ACON to maintain its lucrative advertising contract. In August 2007, for example, SSO reported absurd claims made by Tony Trimingham, the founder of Family Drug Support, that "Crystal meth is not addictive" and is less abused in Australia than hard drugs like heroin. While blatantly untrue, they nevertheless support ACON's agenda of misinformation