By Sen. John Laird
I’ve been involved in the Santa Cruz community since I arrived as a student at UCSC in 1968, and I realize it gives me a historical perspective those who have come of age since are not aware of.
It has been almost two generations since the dawn of the AIDS Crisis gripped our country and our county, and it is hard to believe that even in the Santa Cruz community it was a very difficult road until the drug cocktail became available that limited the effects of HIV.
Lost to time has been the stigma associated with HIV then. In those early years of the AIDS Project, a woman was fired from her job in Santa Cruz for volunteering with a person with HIV. As a city councilmember at the time, I authored an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of HIV, so that things like that would not happen again.
In the 10-year period beginning in 1985, roughly 240 Santa Cruz County residents died from HIV. In the mid-1980s, six of us formed the Santa Cruz AIDS Project (SCAP), a nonprofit community mobilization to provide education and client services. I was executive director in the 1990s, and at one
