In March, Harper's magazine, ordinarily classy, bohemian, and reliably well written and reported, went ape. The venerable journal published an account of clinical drug trials that was more baleful (and more fantastic) than that painted by John le Carré in his 2000 novel The Constant Gardener, where pharmaceutical companies and governments murderously collude to hide the truth about an experimental drug.

The Harper's story, "Out of Control," by Celia Farber, is an extraordinary, overheated document. Farber is a polemicist, notorious for advancing the "Duesberg hypothesis": the argument, proposed by University of California, Berkeley, virologist Peter Duesberg, that HIV does not cause AIDS. Instead, as Farber writes in Harper's, "It could very well be the case that HIV is a harmless passenger virus that infects a small percentage of the population and is spread primarily from mother to child." Like Duesberg, Farber believes that in the United States and Europe, AIDS sufferers have poisoned themselves: "many cases of AIDS are the consequence of heavy drug use, both recreational (poppers, cocaine, methamphetamines, etc.) and medical (AZT, etc.)." In Africa, she argues, AIDS is a kind of confidence game played by pharmaceutical companies and national governments: she uncritically offers up Duesberg's position that "AIDS in Africa is best understood as an umbrella term for a number of old diseases, formerly known by other names, that...do not command high rates of international aid." Duesberg (and, we presume, Farber) consequently believes that all anti-HIV medications are poisonous shams promoted by self-serving researchers, executives, and activists: "If toxic AIDS therapies were discontinued, [Duesberg] says, thousands of lives could be saved virtually overnight."