This is one of my many unpublished cranky Letters to the Editor of the New York Times, written in July 2000 in response to an editorial urging more infusion into Africa of cheap pharmaceuticals for treating AIDS. The grim irony was that this article had come out just days after another article in the Times had pointed to the insufficiency of purely pharma / treatment-based approaches in the United States, where infection rates were beginning to rise again for the first time in a decade. The rise was almost surely related to the rise of pharma-only approaches to AIDS and the lowering emphasis on preventative approaches based on safer sex and sex education. Treatment of those already infected through affordable pharmaceuticals is a necessary part of fighting back against the emerging AIDS holocaust in Africa, but it is not a sufficient part. Unless supplemented with comprehensive preventative programs (based not only on safer sex and sex education, but also the alleviation of poverty and the empowerment of women and girls), the monomaniacal emphasis on pharmaceutical solutions by Western liberals will only shift the nature of the AIDS catastrophe as it has been shifted in the USA, with infection and death rates soaring amongst those who do not have the money and access for pharmaceuticals while the privileged classes come through relatively unscathed.