Month: February 2005

What is happening to serendipity and socialization in a world where everyone has white wires coming out their ears? My latest column for the Sunday Times is now up.

ALTMAN WALKS BACK: Larry Altman, whose uneven reporting on HIV has been debunked before, is now walking back his paper’s hysterical series of articles on an alleged HIV strain that is not new and whose virulence has not been proven. What’s really shocking to me is that we finally have evidence for why the health authorities panicked. Here’s the money quote:

At the time [the single patient involved] tested HIV-positive, his CD4 cell count — a gauge of the health of his immune system — was lower than 100, a sign of advanced AIDS. A normal CD4 cell count is more than 650, and U.S. patients generally are infected 10 years before the CD4 count drops that low.

This is baloney. In fact, it’s extremely common for newly infected people to see their CD4 counts plummet very fast in the early stages before their own immune system bounces back. If they’re chronic crystal users, that immune system may be shot and may take some time to recover. In other words, this kind of drop in CD4 counts is routine among the newly infected. I’ve known dozens of cases where just-infected men see their CD4 counts drop to scary levels and viral load soars. But soon they recover. Again: more evidence that this “story” is no story. If health authorities want to warn people of the dangers of crystal meth use and of unprotected sex, then they absolutely should. But they shouldn’t use this kind of unsubstantiated scare tactic. It will only discredit the authorities. Would I buy anything New York’s health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, says in the future? Put it this way: he no longer has the benefit of the doubt. That’s not good for a public health authority.

ESTRICH VS KINSLEY: The exchange has to be read to be believed.

It will now post notices of ‘civil partnerships’ between gay couples, civil marriages in all but name, in its august pages. In Britain, marriage rights are imminent for gay couples, as is increasingly the case in most of the civilized world. Today was the first announcement.

“For those of us who believe we should train our daughters according to Titus 2, 1 Peter 3, and other Biblical passages, my answer is “Yes, it is not good.” I propose that sports greatly hinders the development of godly, Biblical, feminine character. Parents today expend extraordinary amounts of time and energy taking their daughters from one sports event to another, week after week, even to the point where it exhausts the family and family resources. The fruits we see are that today’s Christian women are often ill- prepared to be Biblically obedient wives and mothers. This brings to mind a couple of questions: “Why do we spend so much time preparing our daughters to play sports?” and “What does it prepare them for in the future?” My answer is that sports prepare women to be more like men. Instead of spending all that time preparing our daughters as the Bible directs, we are training them to be like men so they can better compete with men in traditionally masculine roles – i.e., compete with them in the workforce, in politics, in the military, and in sports.” – Scott Jonas, in Jesus-Is-Savior.com, outlining fundamentalist opposition to women in sports. No one should be under any illusions that gays are not the only targets of some Christian fundamentalists. The freedom of women to live lives as they see fit is also anathema to these activists.

“For those who have marveled at baseball’s homoerotic rituals – the butt-slapping, the excessive man-hugs – let Jose Canseco, author of “Juiced,” add a more intimate encounter. Canseco claims that while he was playing for the Oakland A’s in the late 1980s, he and teammate Mark McGwire would lock themselves in a bathroom stall and inject each other with steroids. Pause on that image for a moment. Canseco was 6 feet 4 inches and weighed in the neighborhood of 250 pounds; McGwire was 6 feet 5 inches and adding beef like an Arby’s franchise – for the two of them to squeeze into a men’s room stall must have presented something of a geometric challenge. Now imagine McGwire gently lowering his uniform pants while Canseco (“I’m a good injector”) hovers over his derriere with a syringe, and add the fact that these men are enjoying this ritual immensely, even laughing about it, and there you have an enduring image of the Bash Brothers. Back, back, back, back, back-side!” – Bryan Curtis, Slate.

I let rip on the academic Stalinists baying for Summers’ blood on the Chris Matthews Show this weekend. I cannot believe the hysteria. Well, actually, the sad things is I can believe it. But if Summers goes down, the chilling effect on intellectual freedom in this country will be intense. That’s what the far left wants – turning universities into propaganda tools rather than centers for genuine intellectual inquiry. The idea of the university, to purloin Newman and Oakeshott, is under attack. This is about far more than university politics. It’s about the future of free inquiry.

“I read your blog about the meth crisis among gay men. I am a psychiatrist in Atlanta and have a significant gay male population. Of all the mental health disorders I treat – including the most severe forms of psychosis and other affective disorders – meth dependence scares me the most. When I am approached for help by these poor souls, my heart sinks. There is the traditional psychosocial treatment (i.e., 12-step recovery programs), which is great, but I cannot conceive of a more addicting and destructive substance to curse mankind, so I worry that this is not enough. What’s more, there is very little press about meth, in the straight or gay media, which leaves the susceptible with the tragic impression that this isn’t such a big deal. Yet, the horror stories I have heard – mind you, I am a psychiatrist and I thought I had heard it all – make my knees shake with utter terror.
The progress the gay community has made with HIV awareness, research and policy is miraculous. But I agree with you: it is all for naught unless we smother this monster to its evil core. That meth is a vector for HIV is a sad reality; I fear that its potential for total descruction makes it worse than any threat HIV/AIDS has ever presented. We need to see it for what it is: mean, nasty, dirty death.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “I am 34, and just old enough to remember the period when people were dropping like flies. I would venture to guess that today at least half of the new infections are directly caused by meth use, and even more by secondary infections via other people who’ve been infected by them. I think that if you removed meth from the equation, the momentum of the epidemic would drop off dramatically. Unfortunately, there is not much of a commitment within the community to stopping the crystal epidemic. I think “harm reduction” has caused more damage than most people realize. My best friend is one of the casualties. He was once very talented and fun to be with, but has descended so far into psychosis that he is barely recognizable. I expect he will be dead within a year, in some ways, he already is.
I think what’s needed is a healthy dose of peer pressure, positive and negative, among young people. Forget the people who’ve already gotten into meth, they are beyond reason until they decide to get clean. I am more concerned with the younger guys who’ve heard so many scare stories they don’t believe how evil meth really is. Peer pressure worked in the early 90s. I felt there was tremendous pressure to remain safe, but without a lot of moralizing. Whatever was going on it worked, and it kept infection rates here very low for well over a decade, until the Internet caught on in the late 90s. Nancy Reagan did have a point, you can’t get addicted to something you’ve never used. People forget that.
I am convinced that the Internet changed the nature of drug addiction in large cities. Speed has been a problem here for decades. What the Internet did was enable people to create a subculture that changed the way people used drugs. Instead of getting high to go dance, they’d get high and look for tricks online. While I’ve always been critical of excessive drug use, at least way back in the 1990s people would generally use them for social/entertainment purposes, which did a lot to limit the damage they caused. If you were single, you generally had to leave your house to get laid, and you generally had to be somewhat presentable. The Internet upset that balance, and turned drug use into a more private activity.” Yes, the Internet undoubtedly played a critical part in the new meth subculture. It is also killing gay nightlife. So many gay men are at home, cracked out online that the bars and clubs are empty. Socialization has begun to disappear. Even if HIV were not here, this would be a curse. But the combination of meth and HIV is literally deadly.

A tropical fish has been named after me! Yes: it’s a gay hawkfish. I’m a carnivore, long-nosed, and my temperament is “semi-aggressive.”

“We will be influenced by our faith but we also have an obligation to take the widest perspective — to recognize that one of the great strengths of Canada is its respect for the rights of each and every individual, to understand that we must not shrink from the need to reaffirm the rights and responsibilities of Canadians in an evolving society.

The second argument ventured by opponents of the bill is that government ought to hold a national referendum on this issue. I reject this – not out of a disregard for the view of the people, but because it offends the very purpose of the Charter.

The Charter was enshrined to ensure that the rights of minorities are not subjected, are never subjected, to the will of the majority. The rights of Canadians who belong to a minority group must always be protected by virtue of their status as citizens, regardless of their numbers. These rights must never be left vulnerable to the impulses of the majority.

We embrace freedom and equality in theory, Mr. Speaker. We must also embrace them in fact.

Third, some have counseled the government to extend to gays and lesbians the right to “civil union.” This would give same-sex couples many of the rights of a wedded couple, but their relationships would not legally be considered marriage. In other words, they would be equal, but not quite as equal as the rest of Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, the courts have clearly and consistently ruled that this option would offend the equality provisions of the Charter. For instance, the British Columbia Court of Appeal stated that, and I quote: ‘Marriage is the only road to true equality for same-sex couples. Any other form of recognition of same-sex relationships …falls short of true equality.'” – prime minister Paul Martin of Canada, blazing a trail for civil rights, in the Canadian parliament yesterday.

CRUCIFIXION: Isn’t that what this particular interrogation technique amounts to? Money quote:

Al-Jamadi was brought naked below the waist to the prison with a CIA interrogator and translator. A green plastic bag covered his head, and plastic cuffs tightly bound his wrists. Guards dressed al-Jamadi in an orange jumpsuit, slapped on metal handcuffs and escorted him to the shower room, a common CIA interrogation spot. There, the interrogator instructed guards to attach shackles from the prisoner’s handcuffs to a barred window. That would let al-Jamadi stand without pain, but if he tried to lower himself, his arms would be stretched above and behind him. The documents do not make clear what happened after guards left. After about a half-hour, the interrogator called for the guards to reposition the prisoner, who was slouching with his arms stretched behind him. The interrogator told guards that al-Jamadi was “playing possum” – faking it – and then watched as guards struggled to get him on his feet. But the guards realized it was useless. “After we found out he was dead, they were nervous,” Spc. Dennis E. Stevanus said of the CIA interrogator and translator. “They didn’t know what the hell to do.”

Notice: a CIA interrogator – not some free-lance goon on the night shift. We need to know and we need to know now whether this technique – Palestinian hanging – was approved for use by the CIA. There’s a memo that will let us know. The White House won’t release it. Where is the Congress? Where, for example, is John McCain? If he won’t stand up against sanctioned torture by the CIA, who will?

What to make of the fact that two patients in two cities have acquired an HIV viral strain that appears resistant to a majority of the current anti-HIV drugs and seems also to be accelerating progression to AIDS in one of the cases? The answer: so far, not much. We know that HIV can and will resist drug treatments – it’s a mutating retrovirus. We also know that progression to AIDS varies dramatically from patient to patient. We know that the interaction between the genetic make-up of a particular HIV strain and a person’s own unique immune system makes a huge difference in how people respond to the illness. We know that use of crystal meth accelerates the decline of someone’s immune system to a phenomenal degree. Any or all of these factors could explain the New York case. To infer from one case a new species of “super-AIDS” is speculation – but one that has now prompted several major articles in the New York Times in a few days. I have to say I’m obviously concerned but also skeptical. Previous scare stories were at least always based on actual peer-reviewed studies of groups of people – not one or two cases presented at press conferences. Some epidemiological context: in San Francisco, the epicenter of the epidemic, AIDS deaths last year were 182, compared to a peak of 1,633 in 1992; AIDS cases were 245, compared to a peak of 2,327 in 1992. Both numbers were far lower than in 2003. Of course, this reflects what has happened in the epidemic, not what will or may happen. But HIV infection rates have also remained stable. We should not be complacent. But we shouldn’t panic either.

METH IS THE ISSUE: The real problem in the gay male epidemic right now is the use of crystal meth (it is hurting the health of people already HIV-positive just as much as it is contributing to the infections of people who are HIV-negative). This drug has rampaged and is coursing through straight rural America and parts of gay urban America. As many of you know, I’m a libertarian when it comes to recreational drug use (and what consenting adults do in private). But I draw the line at this drug. It’s evil, potent beyond belief, it’s destroying people’s minds, careers, lives and souls. If we don’t get a grip on it, it may undo all the progress we have made against HIV in the gay world. We gay men shouldn’t simply fund advertizing or ask health authorities to help (although that’s necessary). We should start insisting privately on zero tolerance of this drug among our friends and loved ones. We should do this informally, socially, privately – out of love and concern for one another. We should encourage every addict to get treatment. (Here’s one resource. I’ll happily post more if contacted.) We have risen to the occasion before and we can do so again. Not by stigmatizing, blaming or ostracizing. But by confronting, persuading, begging one another to overcome this menace.

I’m told the blogger segment on Charlie Rose will air tonight. I hope this time, they’re not mistaken.