The AIDS Cult

From AIDS Wiki

The AIDS Cult: Essays on the Gay Health Crisis (ISBN 0943742102) is a 1997 collection of papers and essays edited by John Lauritsen and Ian Young.

The AIDS Cult focuses on the psychological and social aspects of "AIDS" from the dissident perspective, which questions the prevailing HIV/AIDS hypothesis. As Young states in the introduction, "The eight contributors to this collection have varied backgrounds and different vantage points. All of them agree that the orthodox view of our protracted health crisis – as a highly infectious contagion from without – has been found wanting, and that we must seek the causes of this and other medical dilemmas in our own society, our own assumptions, our group-fantasies, our regimens, our recreations, and our rituals."

A consistent theme encountered in all the chapters of this collection is the fact that the mind and body are intimately connected, and it is a mistake of orthodox medicine to have divorced them. Many of the essays discuss epidemic hysteria, hypnosis, information overload, cultural programming, and bone-pointing and provide substantial evidence of the reality of these phenomena. Pathological and toxicological causes of illnesses associated with AIDS are also discussed, and the combination of toxicological and psychological factors is explored in both of Lauritsen's essays.

The book was inspired in part by the late Casper Schmidt, who was one of the first people to publicly question the HIV theory in print in his paper "The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS", published in 1984. The book contains an interview by Young of Schmidt in November of 1992, shortly before Schmidt's death.

The book contains an extensive bibliography on nitrite inhalants ("poppers") and their toxicities. Most of these were published in medical journals prior to the announcement of HIV as the cause of AIDS in 1984.