HIV decriminalization. (The Democratic Party of Cook County, Illinois enforced it all the way to the end.)

Being infected with HIV is a horrible thing.

I know some people who live with HIV, and while progress has been made, I doubt there will ever be a vaccine or a cure. It’s simply too profitable, and the drug companies admit cures are not profitable. You cure something, and in a few years nobody needs the cure anymore. Better to just keep hitting them for $133.33 a pill (Genvoya).

Many people could get by just fine taking a $13 a day pill (Atripla, generic), which is still steep, but that’s America, but “patent evergreening” keeps resulting in new drugs and corrupt doctors that are working against the patient’s best interest who prescribe them.

But we all know drug companies are corrupt, so let us move on.

HIV Criminalization is the result of an anti-gay “AIDS Panic” in the 1980s.

It was based on moral disgust more than science, even the science of the 1980s.

Today, nearly anyone who wants to be on HIV medication can get it through a program (governmental or drug company), and nobody really has to die of AIDS in America.

In fact, the CDC and WHO and many health authorities in the world got together and couldn’t name a case of an HIV-positive person infecting anyone else, if their viral load was “undetectable”, meaning the medications were keeping them in remission.

That’s why they started saying “Undetectable = Untransmissible”.

Is that true? I’m not sure. I’d still use other protection, but it’s probably true.

But aside from the U=U campaign, it’s also not the 1980s in other ways.

We know definitively how HIV spreads now and outside of IV drug needle sharing, unprotected (especially anal) sex, and the occasional healthcare worker sticking themselves with a dirty needle, it’s not that easy to transmit HIV.

We have wonderful ways of preventing HIV, such as pre and post-exposure prophylaxis, so even the “needle stick” stories aren’t that common, and you can get on PEP after being raped or having a condom break or something.

So HIV is on the decline in America. It’s one of the few unqualified success stories of the Obama Administration.

Since it’s widely known how HIV spreads now, people who choose to voluntarily engage in high risk activities despite knowing (it’s common knowledge) that HIV is out there and how it spreads, have pretty much made their decision.

So why is is that the Democrat prosecutors Anita Alvarez and Kim Foxx of Cook County, Illinois, continued pursuing the Illinois Criminal HIV Exposure law up until last year when the law was discarded?

Illinois had a particularly nasty variant of the law that made activities that couldn’t infect a person with HIV a felony for “exposing someone to HIV”.

What what!?

It’s true. These laws were rooted in 1980s anti-gay paranoia, not science. The law was never updated, so if you spat in a cop’s face or something, they’d throw another felony at you while they were at it anyway, even though saliva cannot transmit HIV.

That’s just one example.

Others involved discouraging people from getting tested and going on medication lest the state somehow get ahold of their medical results and enter them into evidence, making HIV treatment that would render them non-infectious off limits to avoid going to prison.

The New York Times wrote an article on this topic. (Crunched with the NewsWaffle and converted to simple HTML and archived.)

Some people who use drugs are a “persecuted minority” although it may surprise people to hear me say this.

They’re a societal problem that does need to be dealt with somehow, compassionately, humanely. That’s not what the government will do.

It’s a monster of the United States government’s own making.

The CIA was exposed for trafficking crack cocaine into the inner cities to raise money that Congress didn’t appropriate in order to set up a “black budget”, and the result on the other end was that a lot of black people went to prison, where they would be used (among other things) for slave labor, under Joe Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill.

So the government has never had a big problem with drugs. They raise money for the CIA and they send poor blacks to prison where they’re put into slavery for pennies an hour working everything from call centers to license plates to road construction. Driving down wages of people who are not incarcerated at the same time.

Jack Webb’s reward for exposing the CIA cocaine scandal was that they ruined his life and drove him into divorce and bankruptcy and then came back and suicided him a few years later.

(We’re meant to believe that a guy who shot himself in the head did so twice.)

That’s what you get for becoming a problem for the assholes in charge.

The fact that Joe Biden is now the president and that the black community helped put him there, instead of joining with us to promote Bernie Sanders, shows how quickly everything can be forgotten.

Biden has been worse for the black community than Donald Trump, which is an achievement. But getting the black community to vote for him was a bigger one.

It’s a problem in society in general, not just the black community, that things everyone saw this man do 30 years ago are completely forgotten now.