ACT UP brought the focus back to the urgency for human lives

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Setting the scene

I was all emotional when I left the cinema on Monday having gone to watch a film titled 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) [French with English subtitles] that was brought to my notice by my friend.

It was a historical perspective of ACT UP Paris in the early 1990s created along the lines of the direct-action advocacy group ACT UP in the United States.

To the many of us who live with HIV or have had the amazing turn-around from full-blown AIDS, we owe the greatest depth of gratitude to the people who initiated the ideas behind starting the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and how they carried through their advocacy until governments and Big-Pharma were responsive to the plight of all afflicted by the scourge.

At the expense of the dying

From the early discovery of that disease that began to cut a swathe through first the homosexual community, then drug users and unto haemophiliacs, the governments of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand simply ignored the fact that people were suffering and dying from this new disease.

We saw pictures of emaciated bodies, scientists were involved in a race to understand the disease and especially in the United States mostly for personal glory and national one-upmanship rather than for those who stood to benefit the most from their research efforts. The people who were dying cut down in their prime out of institutional indifference and corporate inertia, there appeared to be no urgency towards the emergency.

I could not have felt a better sense of justice when The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008 honoured the French side of the research efforts and spurned the American side of the battle. Some of the people were playing with lives that were precariously at the precipice of total annihilation through AIDS.

Dragging their feet as people died

It was in the light of this discovery and understanding of the virus that pharmaceutical companies began to work on new drugs but were holding back research results and preventing the early adoption of experimental drugs that could possibly immediately health outcomes for people who already had HIV.

This is where ACT UP’s advocacy forced the question, pushed the debate and ultimately compelled governments and institutions to not only recognise the health emergency but get engaged in eradicating AIDS.

A primer on direct action advocacy

The film centred around the debating forum of ACT UP Paris with their Chatham House type of rules of engagement, the strategies for making the headlines, the resistance they faced from the authorities and pharmaceutical companies before they could no more be ignored and the real issue itself, for all the protests and advocacy, it was essentially about real human-beings, their private fears, their public rage, the loves of their lives and the loss of many who succumbed to AIDS.

More poignantly, ACT UP in its concept and activity was a model of activism that had people normally marginalised, usually persecuted, and generally ostracised decide they had had enough of being isolated and ignored by society, maybe even criminalised by the establishment to identify with a cause for which they had nothing to lose because many in their community including themselves were dying.

It was a movement of existential urgency and by that, it brought attention, engagement and radical change to the way HIV and AIDS was tackled and managed. There is no doubt that advocacy groups like ACT UP are needed today to fight for rights and freedoms that the comfortable and unafflicted enjoy. It is to those who found the courage to upset the status quo that I dedicate this, for without you, we would not be here.

If it is the only film you watch this season, it would have been worthwhile. 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) [98% on Rotten Tomatoes]

The faucet apothecary

Water throw-ups

There was a period of about 10 years when I could not drink water without falling sick. One time, I was offered pills at a clinic with a glass of water and promptly threw up the whole thing in less than five minutes.

You cannot imagine the after-taste of bitter sick aided by pills that usually have to be sugar-coated to be ingested in the first instance.

Now, I can handle sparkling water quite well whilst still water makes me quite uncomfortable.

Beyond washing out my mouth with tap water, it would never go down my gullet, however, boiled water for tea or coffee is fine with me.

Water in the bottle

A few weeks ago, we had this entire rumpus about bottled water being immoral, now, there might be scientific or environmental studies that support the view that bottled water is not environmental sound, but when it gets hijacked by activists, anarchists and carbon Nazis, I suddenly go deaf to it all.

Then there is the view that we are wasting money and environmental clout on bottled water when tap water would suffice – that might be good for some, but how do I get the sparkle into my tap water? I definitely would not be doing D-I-Y (Do It Yourself) sparkling water – that is completely out of the question.

The faucet chemist

Just as one ventures toward the moral faucet of holy water, news comes to us from the States that Americans are subjects in a seeming homoeopathic drug trial of antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones.

It appears their tap water contains traces of these drugs, that is not to say that some bottled water that is just the repackaging of tap water does not contain traces, if tested for specific pharmaceuticals.

Traces and homoeopathy

I used the word homoeopathic earlier to highlight a worrying situation that we would be told to ignore considering scientists do not believe that homoeopathy has any efficacy.

Some people have benefited from homoeopathy to various extents where medicaments are diluted to a point that they are scientifically untraceable before being administered in treatment.

Advocates contend that water has a way of memorising information stored in it at one time no matter how much it is diluted – science contends the dilutions make the homoeopathic remedies no better than placebos.

I would say homoeopaths have not offered conclusive proof and scientists are testing within the framework of ideas and laws that may not explain to the best possible extent of knowledge available to man why homoeopathy is efficacious to some users and benefactors and not to others.

Curative water supplies

However, back to the stream of the modern faucet, if tests are able to detect with such assuredness the presence of pharmaceuticals a lot higher than typical homoeopathic dilutions, what is to say many are not already self-medicating through tap water to deal with bacterial infections, epilepsy, depression, sex alteration or erectile dysfunction? Perish the thought.

But with the price of drugs in the States, you can drink in New York what would fill you with heart medicine, infection fighters, oestrogen, anti-convulsants, a mood stabiliser and a tranquilliser.

Choose your city

The city of brotherly love would cuddle you with medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems, in fact, 56 pharmaceuticals or their derivatives.

You will never have a fit in Southern California and gender adjustment might just do fine in San Francisco – no allusions to realities there.

If you happen to live in the following cities of Albuquerque, New Mexico; Austin, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Virginia, there is nowt in the water, you need a new water board.

It is safe, they say

Before we get irrationally hysterical, we are told that all these supplies meet all federal and state standards for quality of water – which might mean standards have to be raised and some more exploratory tests need to be conducted to ascertain what comes to all in drinking water.

Meanwhile, when I sing in the shower, I might just wear a shower cap over my lips to create a new type of sound, this type of water pollution; which, it is, without any shadow of a doubt; is not confined to those across the pond, apparently.