TIMELINE:
Bill Clinton was Attorney General of Arkansas from 1977 to 1979
He was governor from 1979 to 1981 and from 1983 to 1992.
Arkansas’s prison blood program began in 1964.
In
1978, (while
Bill Clinton was the state's Attorney General), the state contracted with Health Management Associates Inc. (HMA), to run both the prison medical program and the plasma program. HMA sold each unit of plasma for fifty dollars, and the donating prisoner was usually paid seven dollars in scrip.
State AGs are charged with oversight of state contracts, so at this point Bill Clinton knew, or reasonably (in the course and scope of his employment) should have known, as the legal standard for negligence states, that the state was selling prisoners' blood.
1980 - while Bill Clinton was Governor, the first AIDS case was officially recognized in the US. April 24, 1980, San Francisco resident Ken Horne, the first AIDS case in the United States to be recognized at the time, is reported to the Center for Disease Control with Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). He was also suffering from Cryptococcus.
In
1982, many pharmaceutical companies ceased buying prison plasma after a December 1982
warning from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that prisoners were more likely than the general population to be infected with the AIDS virus.
In 1984, the FDA revoked the license of the HMA plasma center after it had distributed hepatitis-contaminated plasma, though it managed to secure its license again after a few months. SO IN 1984,
GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON KNEW ABOUT HIS STATE'S SALE OF TAINTED PRISONERS' BLOOD.
In
1985, the Arkansas Board of Corrections hired the Institute for Law and Policy Planning (ILPP) in Berkeley, California, to conduct an independent investigation into HMA’s practices. The institute discovered instances in which HMA had violated its state contract in forty areas, including poor health assessment and recordkeeping and the hiring of unlicensed, uncertified, and unqualified staff.
At the same time(1985), Governor Bill Clinton ordered the state police to conduct a similar investigation. The state police investigation found only that a few HMA employees had been running a small-time gambling operation. Clinton urged a swift end to the investigation.
NOW HERE'S THE HEART OF THE OP'S ARTICLE AS TO BILL CLINTON'S ENABLING THIS LETHAL PROGRAM TO NOT ONLY CONTINUE, BUT TO GREATLY EXPAND FOR ANOTHER SEVEN YEARS WHILE HE HELD THE GOVERNOR'S OFFICE.
HMA was able to retain its contract after the state police investigation partly because of the lobbying efforts of HMA’s president, Leonard Dunn, a Pine Bluff banker who later worked on Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign. His negotiations with the state resulted in the creation of an ombudsman position within HMA, which hired a Clinton-appointed judge, Richard Mays, for a two-year contract of $25,000. But after the critical ILPP report was released, HMA lost its contract and dissolved in 1986.
The contract then went to Pine Bluff Biologicals, which expanded the plasma program to other ADC units; at one time, prison plasma accounted for forty percent of the company’s business. But donor-screening problems persisted. In 1989, a prisoner who had been forbidden to donate on account of disease was able to sell plasma twenty-three times after he transferred from the Pine Bluff Diagnostics Unit to Cummins. The March 1991 edition of the Arkansas Times featured a story by Mara Leveritt on inmate plasma sales in Arkansas, raising the public’s awareness of the issue.
In 1994, after Bill Clinton is no longer in charge as Governor, Arkansas be came the last state in the nation to discontinue selling prisoners' blood.
By that time, more than 1,000 Canadians who received plasma contaminated by that drawn from Arkansas prisoners were infected with HIV and 20,000 with hepatitis C.
= new reply since forum marked as read
