Dear friends,

3 years ago I lost my friend/lover because of AIDS, and for 4 years now I have known to be a symptomatic seropositive.

As many of you, I visit hospitals and doctors for my check-ups and treatments once a month.

I also see them in order to visit my friends, and persons I am not acquainted with but who ask me to be visited.

Then I watch television, I read the newspapers: there are many interventions on the subject of AIDS, it almost seems to have become a fashionable topic.

There are prevention campaigns, which look more and more like normal advertisements, and there are the usual world-known medical experts of my country, who continue repeating the usual, obvious things: you cannot get AIDS by sharing cutlery, use condoms, and so on.

Many politicians, journalists, priests, and sometimes even people like us appear on television, seropositives or AIDS sufferers, hidden behind a dark screen or with a filtered voice so as not to be recognized.

These interventions on the medias are the cause of the "criminalization" of the disease. Ten years after the appearance of the epidemic, and six years after the discovery of the virus, such behaviours are no longer acceptable.

By criminalizing us, by inviting us while forcing us to hide our faces, these "sanitary operators", while enhancing their own personal prestige and fame, while filling their private medical offices with paying clients, while in pratice preventing any criticism against their behaviour, are making us weaker and weaker, are preventing us from speaking out, to express a loud and clear request for the respect of our rights and interests, which are nothing but the rights and the interests of the global community.

We from the Positifs association want:

- all decisions concerning us, concerning our life and, also, our death, not to be taken elsewhere, in our absence.

- hospitals, all of them and specialized in all diseases, to be organized in such a way as to satisfy our needs, the needs of the patients and not of the medical staff.

And this means:

- that the home assistance service, the day hospital service must be extended.

- that 'evening hospitals' must be opened, to allow all of us to continue working without being forced to ask for leaves, and in the long run, to lose our jobs.

- we want a considerate experimentation - to know in order to decide - and that is, to know the alternatives, all the alternatives, in order to decide, alone or with our partner or friends, with other seropositives or AIDS patients, supported by their advice and their moral assistance, which treatment to undertake or not to undertake.

- we want to be able to decide of our death as well, we want to be prepared for this, we refuse overtreatment, and claim the right to be able to choose, just like Seneca, Petronius and Bettelheim did, the moment in which life, our life, is no longer worth living, and to be able to choose the best way to leave.

We want the prohibitionist folly to cease.

We want the criminalization of forbidden drugs, of heroin, to cease. This prohibition, and not drugs as such, not heroin, has been the cause for 70% of Hiv infections here in Spain and in my country, Italy.

We want drug addicts to be able to resort to public structures without the fear of being judged, condemned, imprisoned; but only to receive help, information, psychological support, sanitary assistance; but also clean needles, and the drugs they need; those drugs which, because of the prohibitionist folly, they are forced to buy from the mafia at exhorbitant prices; those drugs which force them to have daily contacts with the criminal world, to steal, to prostitute, causing new tragedies and new grief to themselves and to other people.

A new kind of information must arise on this epidemic, a type of information which transforms us from victims into protagonists.

We must not passively depend on the opinions of the medias or on the opinion of the physicians. We must create this information and counter-information ourselves.

It is for this reason that I am inviting all the persons who took part in the conference, all the associations of Hiv-affected persons and all the AIDS patients to joint the Agorà telematic system.

This system will enable us to be connected in real time, in order to:

- publish a news-letter.

- be immediately informed about any new treatments, prophylaxis, and their side effects.

- exchange opinions.

- create an information alternative to the official one, pursuing other goals, in our interest.

- create an electronic archive, to be consulted and enhanced even at a distance, of documents and papers of our interest.