Other Causes
If HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, one is bound to ask, then what does? Leading scientists have advanced multiple credible theories to account for AIDS’s pathogenesis. I will examine three of the most compelling, beginning with Duesberg’s theory, since his explanation arrived first chronologically and inspired the largest and most influential following. Subsequent theories—including hypotheses promoted, ironically, by Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier—have equal persuasive power but enjoyed meager public interest or support. Duesberg’s battle royal had demonstrated Dr. Fauci’s sizable power to destroy careers, and no one after Duesberg had the courage and appetite to challenge the “Little Director” by advancing new theories.
Duesberg’s Theory
Duesberg, Mullis, and their school of critics blame all the lethal symptomology known as AIDS on a multiplicity of environmental exposures that became ubiquitous in the 1980s. The HIV virus, this group insists, was a kind of free rider that was also associated with overlapping lifestyle exposures. Duesberg and many who have followed him offered evidence that heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency among the first generation of AIDS sufferers. They argued that the initial signals of AIDS, Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), were both strongly linked to amyl nitrite—“poppers”—a popular drug among promiscuous gays.63 Other common “wasting” symptoms were all associated with heavy drug use and lifestyle stressors. (Those interested in exploring the debate should read Chapter 3, Virus Hunting Takes Over, of Duesberg’s riveting book Inventing the AIDS Virus.) Suffice it to say that Duesberg makes a compelling case, and his arguments deserve to be aired and civilly debated.
Dr. Duesberg observed that critical AIDS cases in the 1980s were among men engaged in behaviors then commonplace in the post-Stonewall, drug-charged gay party scene. Risk factors included promiscuous sex with multiple partners and cumulative toxic exposures from psychoactive drugs including methedrine, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and a cocktail of antibiotics prescribed to treat ubiquitous sexually transmitted diseases. On average, the early AIDS patients had been on at least three antibiotics courses in the year preceding diagnosis.64
Some 35 percent65 of early AIDS cases were among IV drug users. In his paper “The Role of Drugs in the Origin of AIDS,” Duesberg cites over a dozen medical references documenting AIDS-like immunodeficiency symptoms among drug addicts since 1900.66 The medical literature attests to the ravaging effects of heroin, morphine, speed, cocaine, and other injected drugs on the immune system: “From as early as 1909 evidence has accumulated that addiction to psychoactive drugs leads to immune suppression (clinical autoimmunity), similar to AIDS.”67 Today, thousands of American junkies who are not infected with HIV are losing the same CD4+ T-cells and getting the same diseases as AIDS patients. STDs from promiscuous sex and blood-borne diseases like hepatitis A, B, and C added to the immune suppression among this cohort.
Duesberg’s theory was by no means novel or outlandish. Dr. Fauci himself conceded in 1984 that drugs were a reasonable explanation for PCP and other signature symptoms of AIDS: “If I were to take drugs that would markedly immunosuppress me, there would be a reasonably good chance that I would get that pneumonia. That’s what happens to the AIDS individuals.”68
Poppers and Drugs
Prior to Gallo’s “discovery” of HIV, the initial guess by government researchers and leading scientists was that recreational drugs were the prime suspects. Duke Medical School’s renowned infectious disease expert, Professor David Durack, who served on NIH’s Bioethics Committee, asked the (still relevant) question in his lead article in the December 1981 NEJM69: How can AIDS be so evidently new, when viruses and homosexuality are as old as history?70 Recreational drugs, according to Durack, should be considered as causes: “They are widely used in the large cities where most of these cases have occurred. Perhaps as suggested one or more of these recreational drugs is an immunosuppressive agent.” Durack observed that, other than drug-using homosexuals, the only patients with AIDS symptoms were “junkies.”71 In Duesberg’s view, the highest risk addiction was the ubiquitous use of amyl nitrite poppers, which had well-established links with autoimmune disease.
The first AIDS cases were five gay men—all unknown to one another—diagnosed with a rare (PCP) pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma, a form of cancer that had previously afflicted only elderly men. Dr. Michael Gottlieb, a researcher searching California hospitals for new diseases with unusual symptomology, is credited with the initial discovery and characterization of the disease and its epidemiologic context. in Los Angeles in 1981, by Dr. Michael Gottlieb, a researcher searching California hospitals for new diseases with unusual symptomology. The men were all promiscuous party enthusiasts in the “fast lane” gay lifestyle. They were taking many different recreational drugs simultaneously and combining drugs in excess of patterns among straight drug users. They frequented bars, clubs, and bathhouses. They had daily multiple anonymous sexual partners—upward of a thousand per year—and contracted most of the common sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, gonorrhea, and hepatitis B. They were, therefore, also functionally addicted to a pharmacopoeia of antibiotic prescription medications; “all of that created a situation where a handful of gay men,” says Mark Gabrish Conlan “were burning the candle at both ends and putting a blowtorch to the middle. It’s no wonder that after a while, their immune systems started to collapse and they started getting sick in these unusual ways that previously had only been seen in older people whose immune systems had deteriorated from age.”72
John Lauritsen, a gay activist, was probably the longest-running AIDS journalist: “My first major AIDS article was in 1985. The very early AIDS cases were really quite sick, and there were very good reasons why they were sick.”73