ABSTRACT
One of the largest causes of HIV transmission in the United States is the sharing of needles and syringes for the injection of drugs. It has led to over 205,000 documented cases of AIDS. At least twice as many whites as African Americans inject drugs, but injection-related HIV transmission disproportionately affects communities of color. African-American and Latino communities face a public health crisis. If we combine data on AIDS and drug use, we find that among those who inject drugs, African Americans are four times as likely as whites to get AIDS (Day, 1997). In 1996 almost 100,000 African Americans had injection-related AIDS or had died from AIDS. AIDS is the leading cause of death among twenty-four to forty-four-year-old Latinos in the United States; more than half of those deaths are injection-related. The AIDS death rate for Latinos in this age group is more than double that of whites in the same age group (Day, 1997). Latinos are three times more likely to contract AIDS than to die from an overdose.
