FINANCIAL PERIL STILL EXISTS FOR AIM HEALTHCARE

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this victory for the medical confidentiality rights of adult video performers and for AIM's ability to provide testing, monitoring and treatment for those performers free of unlawful state intrusion. Cal-OSHA made no secret of its intention to use whatever information it might have obtained through this subpoena to establish connections between AIM patients and the producers who engage them and thus to justify the imposition of potentially ruinous fines on those producers on the dubious grounds of engagement in proximity to the detection of sexually transmitted infections.

This was a heavy-handed attempt by a state agency to write new law expansively reinterpreting its mandate with the intent of punishing adult video producers for misfortunes to which those producers causal relationship cannot be medically or legally established. The court found Cal-OSHA's claims to such authority entirely meritless and its methods in contravention of existing law.
Thus Cal-OSHA has failed in its attempt to use the Adult Video Industry's key STD testing and monitoring organization as a weapon against that industry.

But however welcome Judge Smith's wise ruling may be, it by no means eliminates the threat of Cal-OSHA's ongoing vendetta against our community of performers and producers, and while it protects AIM from further harassment by Cal-OSHA's agents and employees, it leaves AIM in dire financial straits that threaten the foundation's ability to operate as it has with such success over the past dozen years. Litigation of this type is catastrophically expensive for a small, non-profit organization supported by voluntary donations and the at-cost services it provides. AIM has no budget for paying attorney's fees, travel expenses for repeated trips to Oakland, where the case was heard, research expenses and the other financial burdens imposed by having to defend itself, and the industry at large, against the vastly greater resources of state government.

As of now, AIM has unpaid debts arising out of this case in excess of $170,000 dollars, and if those debts are not paid, AIM's clinics face the very real possibility of having to close its clinic's doors for good within before the year is out.

If that happens, AIM's courtroom victory will look a lot like defeat for everyone involved in the making of adult video. Cal-OSHA and other governmental agencies and certain NGOs do not believe in our ability to regulate ourselves and protect the health of our performers. AIM's extraordinary record since its inception of doing exactly that is the industry's most compelling argument against the heavy-handed and most probably ineffective regulations these outsiders wish to impose.