AIDS and Intravenous Drug Use: The Influence of Morality, Politics, Social Science, and Race in the Making of a Tragedy

by M. Daniel Fernando

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780275942458
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/21/1993
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Wages of Sin Is Death
Intravenous Drug Use and AIDS: U.S. Inaction
The Myth of Needle Sharing: Heroin Subculture, Bleach, and the Impact On Liberalization
The Racial Implications of AIDS Research and Prevention: A Critical Commentary
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Fernando (anthropology, City U. of New York) argues that the only epidemiologically sound way to arrest the spread of AIDS among intravenous drug users, their sexual partners, and their babies, is to liberalize access to needles and to decriminalize the possession of drug paraphernalia, as has been done in almost all the nations of the developed world. He reviews the public attitude towards AIDS victims, the scope and pattern of intravenous drug use and government policy toward it, the place of needles in the drug subculture, and the racial implications. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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