Healthcare Legacies: AIDS Action Now

By the late 1980s, AIDS was a deadly epidemic affecting the world. By 1988, it was estimated that over 60,000 people had died of AIDS or HIV-related illnesses in the U.S. and Canada. Few treatments were widely available during this time and medical care for HIV and AIDS was inconsistent across Canadian hospitals. Those suffering from the disease often were persecuted and isolated.

Several activist groups, such as the AIDS Committee of Toronto, formed to help provide information and health guidance to those suffering from the disease. In 1985, the Committee released “No Sad Songs”, one of the first documentaries on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The documentary focused on the experiences of Jim Black, a gay man suffering from AIDS. Black died of AIDS-related illness several months after the release of the film.

AIDS Action NOW! (AAN!) was a community-based activist group from Toronto, which formed in response to government and medical inaction around HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s. The group focused on extending the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS and improving their quality of life through access to treatment.

OISE teacher George Smith co-founded AAN! in the late 1980s with activist Michael Lynch. In February 1988, AAN! held its first meeting with 300 attendees at Jarvis Collegiate to discuss the group’s demands: access to experimental treatments for those living with AIDS. They became one of the most active AIDS community groups in Toronto during the 1980s and 1990s, expressing their demands at protests and sit-ins throughout Ontario.

In the 1980s, without a vaccine or any widely successful treatment of AIDS, AAN! members demanded the right for AIDS patients to receive experimental treatments not yet approved by Health Canada. AAN! led its first protest in March 1988 outside Toronto General Hospital: members set up empty coffins representing the deaths of AIDS patients due to a lack of access to potentially life-saving drugs.

In response to this protest, along with other activism from AIDS community groups, the Canadian government allowed physicians to offer HIV and AIDS patients experimental treatments on compassionate grounds through the Emergency Drug Release Program (EDRP). By 1995, the EDRP was receiving up to 50,000 requests for experimental treatments annually.

By the 1990s, the world had spent more than a decade fighting HIV/AIDS. Although AZT (azidothymidine) became the first drug approved to treat AIDS in the mid-1980s, new HIV/AIDS treatments were coming out all the time. It could be difficult for HIV/AIDS patients to keep up with the research and what treatment might work best.

In 1990, AAN! became one of the first groups to set up an HIV/AIDS treatment information system in Canada: the system collected the latest information on treatments and distributed it to community groups and physicians. Physicians would then report back to the registry on how successful the treatment had been. Known as the Treatment Information Exchange (TIE), the network provided up-to-date drug treatment information to both patients and physicians.