Does drug use and AZT causes AIDS?
Chief among the dissenters is University of California at Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, who says that AIDS is caused not by HIV, which he deems a harmless “passenger virus,” but by several other factors, including recreational drug use and zidovudine (AZT), a medication used to treat HIV infection. Duesberg has published his AIDS research in numerous scientific journals over the past decade. Much of this research can also be found on his personal Web site. According to an article he wrote for Genetica in 1995, Duesberg claims that the long-term use of such drugs as cocaine, heroin, LSD and nitrite inhalants — not unsafe sex with HIV-infected partners — was initially responsible for the spread of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. He believes that the introduction of AZT in 1987 made matters worse because the medication further weakened the immune systems of people who were diagnosed with AIDS-related diseases such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. AIDS
