safely stickin' it to Tha Man

I'm a lounger, not a fighter:

Great shot by Brettie of a scuffle at the Rites of Spring tournament this weekend in Baltimore. In the photo they appear to be attacking the person in the wheelchair, but that is not the case, just a trick of the camera. I didn't get to play much, but the team played some good rugby against tough competition.

How does Matthew Foxxy-Fox's chest hair disappear on Lost? I'm guessing it's a nutrient deficiency from a diet heavy in island fruits, or some evil force is waxing people while they sleep.

The big paper I wrote last week for my marketing ethics class was about direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements in periodicals marketing anti-HIV medications to the gay male target audience (marketing distribution channel, to those in the business). While chatting with a guy at a fun Baltimore Bear party this weekend, the topic came up again. He kind of shook his head ruefully when the subject of pharmaceutical ads came up, since he was an HIV social worker, and inferred that those ads are a problem.

According to my research, the HIV medication ads showing happy, healthy HIV+ people at the beach or climbing mountainsides feed a surveyed perception that your life is not altered radically under these meds. Also, HIV+ people who read those ads tend to believe that the risk of transmission is reduced (not true) and that they can proceed with unsafe sex practices. Sadly, those ads also affect the perception of the above two issues in HIV-negative people as well, contributing to a rise in unsafe sex and HIV transmission. So basically those sunshiney ads from companies who claim to be helping, actually harm those people who read the ads. Several perception surveys support the above claims, so it's not conjecture.

Such ads by pharmaceutical companies were only allowed in the U.S. after 1996. New Zealand and the United States are the only two countries in the world that allow such advertisements on television and in publications. New Zealand is considering a ban on them as well. The reason most countries don't allow such ads to be printed or broadcast is that they are frequently misleading, or lead to an over-medicalization of daily life. In other words, you can just pop a pill and all your problems will be solved. It's not just a problem with HIV medications, but with parmaceuticals across the board.

In many of these ads the side-effects are frequently not quantified or prioritized. That is, if suicidal thoughts are one side-effect of taking Hivetra (or whatever), it needs to be put on the top of the list, in bold, underlined or whatever. But too often it's listed between headaches and diarrhea (other fun side-effects of HIV medications) in no particular order of severity.

Again, I've stated before that HIV medications are no picnic, and it's not like taking Lunesta or Benadryl. And they don't cure HIV, only treat it and extend your life. The first round of combination drug therapy my roomate was prescribed caused all his mucous membranes to blister - including his lips, nasal lining, rectum and throat. And since many drugs are rushed through the clinical trial period, many longer-term effects of the medications are not discovered until many years later (facial wasting, distended belly, fat redistribution to wierd places).

To me, the creepy part is that it's not uncommon to see these medications take up three pages of ad space in our beloved community publications, like The Advocate, Instinct and Genre. Two facing pages, or three pages is a LOT of ad space to purchase in a color glossy publication. And advertising dollars help pay for the printing and distribution of said publications. These publciations purport to speak to our community, yet are owned by pharmaceutical manufacturers who spend more dollars on marketing than they do on treatment research, and far more on marketing than on research for a cure. I checked: well over $40 BILLION by now. How critical do you think the writers of these publications are about the hand that feeds them?

You do the math - pharmaceutical companies are happy to keep supplying you with a barrage of medications as long as you are alive. And as long as people keep contracting HIV, they're still in business, and so are our community publications.

So there's another reason to continue to keep it safe, it's that in playing safe I'm stickin it to Tha Man. I'd rather not support companies that are profiting so much on a disease, so I will continue my efforts in not contracting the disease.