by Thomas Keister

Oh. My. Fucking. God. Or Buddha, as it were. The National Institutes of Health is launching a two-year study to try and determine why drug-abusing prostitutes and drug-abusing transgender prostitutes are at a greater risk for contracting HIV. Like I said, OMFGOB.

"Substance Use and HIV Risk among Thai Women" will interview 36 female prostitutes and 24 transgender prostitutes and cost $178,000. This is government math, pure and simple. My way of figuring, $100 an hour, times 60 hookers, equals $6,000, or a Friday evening at Eliot Spitzer's house. You pay some NIH flunky $25 a head to interview them, that's another $1500, and then regular salary to format and complete the report. Probably come in at around $10,000. Sounds like somebody is getting paid high dollar out of OUR pockets to get a massive freak on. I can have a blast at a strip club with a $100 bill. $178,000 is a hell of a tab in the grimy ass alleys of Thailand.

To square off the toe of the boot to the groin this whole project is to the taxpayers, the project was launched on April 15- Tax Day. Perfect.

By now, if you follow politics with any regularity, this hardly surprises you. Then again, by this point in history, even a Senator looking for a rough trick in an airport bathroom didn't immediately break the front page. The fact that government waste groups are hitting the roof fails to budge the shock meter needle, but some of the NIH's other heavy-petting projects start approaching the borders.

How's about $400 large to study why gay men in Buenos Aires have risky sex when drunk? How's about because they are just the same as all the straight people who have risky sex when they are drunk - BECAUSE THEY ARE FREAKIN DRUNK! I'll be expecting that check for $400,000 from the National Institutes of Health for solving their damn problem for them, either that or a study to figure out why I haven't been given any money from the U.S. government to answer ridiculously fucking easy questions for them. May not be change I can believe in, but I'll take change I can bank on.

Think that's bad? Hmph. That's what you get for thinking. The coup de grace, the top shelf in absolute bullshit sex crusades on behalf of the NIH has to be the  $2.6 million study dedicated to teaching prostitutes in China to drink less while having sex on the job. $2.6 million to teach Chinese hookers to drink less while working. What in the name of holy damn is wrong with you people. You aren't so much interested in getting these people out of the sex trade, but you'll at least try and sober them up a bit? Don't spend $2.6 million on that, just buy them all a McDonald's cafe coffee so they can pronounce a handjob with a silly little French flair. That'll get the taste of sucking dick for a living out of their mouths better than a shot of Wild Turkey, but then again, I guess the people behind this study already know that, since they apparently have a point for doing this in the first place.

So remember everybody, next time you pick up a hooker for an quick and angry grinder session, don't worry about the risk of getting busted, or getting HIV, or even winding up in some asinine sex scandal. Worry instead about becoming a statistic in a government sex study. No sense in paying twice just to get fucked once.