Weak medicine - first national plan to battle AIDS lacks substance

What's notable a bout the latest pronouncement on AIDS strategy from the White House isn't what it says but what it doesn't say

When the Clinton administration has something to promote, White House spokesman Mike McCurry often takes a few minutes at the top of a briefing to plug it to the press. President Clinton himself sometimes gets in the act, accepting a report in front of photographers or saying a few words to support a new initiative. But when the Administration unveiled the first national strategy to fight AIDS on December 17, barely a peep came from the White House.

In fact if the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS hadn't been meeting in a hotel near Capitol Hill and if AIDS activists hadn't leaked the document to reporters a day in advance, the strategy could have gone largely unnoticed. Maybe that was the intent. After all, there really wasn't that much in the new strategy that was really "news." It laid out six goals that people inside and outside government have voiced for years--developing a cure and a vaccine, reducing new infections, giving those infected with HIV access to the best health care, combating AIDS-related discrimination, leading the world's fight against the disease, and making sure that advances in research quickly lead to new treatment strategies.

The strategy puts AIDS activists, including some of the Members of Clinton's own advisory panel, in a bind. If one of Clinton's Republican predecessors had offered the very same document, some say privately, activists would have screamed and walked out of the room. Two days before the strategy was released to the public, Benjamin Schatz, the executive director of the San Francisco-based Gay and Lesbian Medical Association and a member of the presidential advisory council, fold the rest of the panel he had to recognize that the strategy was better than anything that had been done before. "The question is," said Schatz, "is that our marker?"

The main problem with the document wasn't with what was included but what was left out: items the council had been pressing for since the White House held its AIDS summit in December 1995. "The things we haven't mentioned in here is where the press and the community are going to rip our faces off," says Bob Hattoy, the vocal Clinton administration official who has AIDS and who also sits on the council. The missing pieces are a federal needle-exchange program, support for the medical use of marijuana, and a recognition of the AIDS problem in prisons.

"We are all inspired by the goal that we hope to have no new infections. But no one--no one--thinks we can get there without a major change in policy on needle exchange," says Michael Isbell, associate executive director of the New York City--based AIDS service organization Gay Men's Health Crisis.

Some council members have hinted at protest. "There has to be a crisis over this document," Hattoy says. "Only through a crisis does action take place at this White House." However, the panel voted 26-1 to commend the Clinton administration for its work.

If there is a crisis, the White House sees it going in the other direction. Two weeks after the strategy was released, the Administration announced it would fight laws in California and Arizona that allow people with AIDS and other terminal illnesses to smoke marijuana. Plus, going into the new year, Clinton had yet to appoint anyone to replace Patricia Fleming, the national AIDS policy director, who has decided to leave office. This, AIDS activists contend, is not the right way to create a Clinton legacy.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Liberation Publications, Inc.
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