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interactions, resistance, and mortality rates. They also arranged to acquire the left-over
prescription drugs from the estates of those who died, auctioning the prohibitively expensive
drugs cheaply to their members. Most importantly perhaps, given their interest in treatment
evaluation, the clubs provided regular meeting spaces to exchange case histories among their
members, performing their own versions of reliability measures and adding to the knowledge
base of the “treatment community.”
The clubs operated on the fringes of the law, working somewhat as consumer advocates
and somewhat as smugglers. Buyers’ clubs represented a new degree of illegitimate community
organizing; a break with the pursuit of institutional acceptance and a greater commitment to
community ownership of HIV/AIDS. They called themselves “the AIDS underground.” The first
and largest formally recognized buyers’ club, the PWA Health Group, was created in 1986
(incorporated 1987) by Michael Callen (with Joe Sonnabend and Thomas Hannan), “out of the
approval of AZT.” (AZT was the first approved drug therapy for AIDS, but toxic in high doses
and not highly effective. The Health Group wanted something better.) One organizer described
the group as “the most official, most conservative face of” the AIDS underground. Even so, for
its first few years the PWA Health Group “worked out of a church so the police would not bust
down the doors.”
While the PWA Health Group specialized in the obscurities of clinical trials and
standards of regulation, a later group, Direct AIDS Alternative Information Resources (DAAIR),
combined access to drugs in trials with the potential benefits of hundreds of herbal remedies. One
Health Group informant stated that they have a “complementary relationship to DAAIR,” but that
DAAIR sometimes perceives them “as a threat.” Fred Bingham, founder and director of DAAIR,
Convention