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Having AIDS Is Not a Crime: A DC March Demands an End to Discriminatory Police Tactics
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169126/having-aids-not-crime-dc-march-demands-end-discriminatory-police-tactics
Byeesha Owens is on the mic as this Wednesday’s We Can End AIDS march in Washington approached its first targets, UPS and Wells Fargo. This is what an AIDS enemy looks like as we enter the fourth decade of the epidemic: those who drive policies that drive the epidemic, and those who profit from disease and discrimination.
It’s Owens’s first AIDS march, and it’s sticky and hot in Washington, and by the time we get to the White House, we’ll have been marching for two hours. She’s here with her aunt from New Jersey, who’s been HIV-positive for over twenty years. The tattoos around Owens’s collarbone glisten. With the heat, there’s more bared skin out on the march than inside the climate-controlled convention center that houses the AIDS conference, where the march stepped off.
As the march neared the UPS store, Owens hoisted the mic up and led the hundreds behind her in a chant, and they halt in front of the store, filling the street for several hundred feet in either directon. March organizers from the HIV Prevention Justice Alliance charge UPS for contributing to the AIDS epidemic by funding Congressional opponents of syringe exchange, which evidence has shown to be one of the most effective ways to prevent HIV transmission.
The march continued on to Wells Fargo, where members of Occupy DC took the mic to link Wells Fargo’s investments in private prisons to fueling mass incarceration, and in turn, the drug war that sends many of the 2.2 million Americans behind bars there in the first place. “Wells Fargo is literally invested in locking more people up,” said Laura Thomas of Drug Policy Alliance. When drug users are targeted by law enforcement, even for legally carrying clean syringes, HIV can run unchecked, including in prisons themselves, where incarcerated people have little access to healthcare, and condoms are often prohibited
