Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.
In Episode Thirty of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘KS, Poppers and the Malpractice of Dr James Curran’, I will focus on the event which convinced me that the CDC’s James Curran was guilty of serious malpractice.
On p133 of ‘And The Band Played On’, Shilts describes how IVDUs, although suffering from the same T4 cell deficiency as gay men, they suffered from PCP pneumonia but not Kaposi’s sarcoma, KS. ‘Only gay men seemed to be getting the skin cancer.’ The gay men were obviously doing something different to the IVDUs. Let Harry Haverkos take up the story: ‘I worked with Dennis Bregman and his co-worker Dr Paul Pinsky. Paul, I think, did a lot of the work, but anyway, they came out with a single variable that separated the gay men with Kaposi's from the gay men with pneumocystis. It was nitrite inhalants (poppers), which was a startling discovery, I thought, and it made a lot of sense to me. It [nitrite] causes blood vessels to dilate, and it [Kaposi's sarcoma] is a blood vessel tumor. Kaposi's is predominantly in gay men, and nitrites are used more by gay men than heterosexuals. It turns out if you reviewed the cancer studies, the research studies that had been done on poppers, it caused cancer in the Ames Test. This made just total sense to me. It was like a eureka moment. But the problem was-- I got these results, so we stopped in September-October of '82. We stopped enrollment, and we finally got the data analyzed. I came back from a meeting in Italy in June of '83, and Paul Pinsky told me what the answer was. Nitrite inhalants. This is now June, July of '83, and I am excited. This is like "hot stuff." Anyway, I presented to the Task Force, and the Task Force was --unimpressed. Jim Curran sent me back to re-analyze, break it out by groups, male interviewers, female interviewers, length of interview. Anyway, it turned out, in the secondary analysis, every analysis was higher [for] Kaposi's, whether you split it up by any of these groups. These results were incredibly robust.
CDC was under the gun from PHS [Public Health Service] because we hadn't found the virus yet. When they put in their budget request--I think [Dr. Walter] Walt Dowdle told me this later, in August or September of '83--it turns out CDC listed their number one accomplishment in their fiscal year 1984 budget request, their major accomplishment was ruling out a role of nitrites as the cause of AIDS. So, I presented this to the Task Force. I couldn't present this. I had a big lecture in San Francisco at the end of August, and Curran made it perfectly clear if I said a word about this study, he'd can me. Emotions were high. There was a lot of tension going on.’ In a research paper Haverkos reported that ‘Multivariate analysis showed that the variable most strongly associated with Kaposi's sarcoma was the use of large quantities of nitrite inhalants.’
On 1 April 1983, a press release was issued by Joseph F. Miller, 'president of Great Lakes Products, Inc., the nation's largest manufacturer of nitrite-based odorants'. It was entitled, 'U.S. Government Studies Now Indicate that Nitrite-Odorants Not Related to AIDS!' According to Miller, 'the assistant director of the Center for Infectious Diseases (a part of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta), Dr. James Curran, invited him to Atlanta in late November of last year to discuss the work being done by CDC relative to its AIDS investigations'. (If true, this meeting would be a
very serious indiscretion on Curran's part, raising the possibility of collusion between the poppers industry and CDC officials.) According to Miller's press release, the CDC assured him that 'no association exists between nitrite-based odorants and AIDS'.
This for me is a shocking episode. Let me reiterate: James Curran, the Chair of the CDC’s KSOI Task Force, the man with overall responsibility for the collation and publication of the Case-Control Study, the most important research of early GRID/AIDS amongst gay men, effectively blocked the dissemination of one of the Case-Control Study’s most important findings, that poppers was key contributor to ‘gay cancer’. This is on top of the mysterious 20 month delay in the publication of the report itself which stated clearly that ‘The occurrence of these diseases (KS/PCP pneumonia/Opportunistic infections) was found to be associated with certain aspects of lifestyle, including a greater number of male sex partners per year, exposure to feces during sex, history of syphilis, non-B hepatitis, EBV and CMV, treatment for enteric parasites, use of various illicit substances.’
Just as occurred with 9/11 and the FBI and the CIA, this was clear evidence of conspiracy and malpractice by a US government organization, clear evidence of putting the preservation of an institution, before the preservation of human life.
Thank you for listening to Episode Thirty of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Thirty-One of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you about my second attempt at a novel, The Fast Lane Experiment.
Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.
A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0285640194 ‘And The Band Played On’
Harry Haverkos interview
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3878602/ Disease manifestation among homosexual men with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: a possible role of nitrites in Kaposi's sarcoma, Haverkos
https://cascades.substack.com/publish/posts My Substack site, ‘A Dive Into Darkness’
Hank Wilson interview – Gay guys, poppers and KS.
https://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/POPBOOK.PDF POPPERS & AIDS. Wilson and Lauritsen
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